Intertextual otherness between Shanghai and Hong Kong: the localisation of space and collective nostalgia in Kung Fu Hustle

From The House of 72 Tenants to Kung Fu Hustle: localisation of cinematic space

Kung Fu Hustle creatively constructs the setting of Pig Sty Alley, where kung fu functions as an idealised value system that differs from conventional spaces, driving the narrative development and shaping a cinematic space that can be considered a ‘heterotopia’ in the Foucauldian sense.⁴ Pig Sty Alley has its own precedents in the history of Sinophone film. It is depicted as an imitation of the typical setting in the classic Shanghai comedy The House of 72 Tenants (Huaji xi). The House of 72 Tenants⁵ was first produced by the Shanghai Dagong Slapstick Troupe in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward. It first appeared in Shanghai as a monodrama performed by Zhu Xiangfei, focusing on the oppressed and exploited underclass who migrated from various regions of the country during the first half of the twentieth century: blood sellers from northern Jiangsu Province, garment workers from Chongming, fish sellers from Ningbo, and small tanners from northern Jiangsu Province, and so on. This established the core logic of the group narrative and the underclass narrative of the theatre.⁶ After a wide circulation via radio, in 1958 the play was revised with a more complete plot and, through the staging, the underclass settlement of the mixed communities was represented and became the site that carried the narrative.

After the play was widely disseminated across mainland China, The House of 72 Tenants was also staged in Guangdong Province in the 1960s. In the adaptation, various local Cantonese dialects were used based on the characteristics of the audience in the province’s capital, Guangzhou, yielding positive results. Consequently, director Wang Weiyi, who was searching for a script to adapt into an international film, chose this play. Wang’s version was released in 1963 and underwent a more thorough localisation, transforming everyday details such as names, customs and living spaces to reflect the habits of the Cantonese region.⁷ To resonate with the contemporary context, it emphasised the class conflicts present in the script, which were also retained in the 1973 adaptation by Chu Yuan in Hong Kong.

The House of 72 Tenants became the starting point for cultural interactions between Shanghai and Hong Kong during the Cold War, being a chaotic and impoverished lower-class society filled with immigrants, vagrants and refugees, characterised by a diverse local population. This shared cultural gene between Shanghai and Hong Kong became an increasingly complex intertextuality through subsequent adaptations, such as the episodes of The 72 Tenants and 72 Tenants of Prosperity. Among these adaptations, Kung Fu Hustle stands out as particularly unique. It is not a retelling of The House of 72 Tenants, nor does it refocus on a class-antagonistic narrative. Instead, it simply uses the core plot of the struggle between the lower-class tenants and the exploitative landlords who monopolise the water tap and cut off the water supply, which triggers a conflict, as the starting point for the narrative.

It is important to note, however, that the shift in the referent of the Shanghai narrative did not originate with Kung Fu Hustle. The residential ecology of 1930s Shanghai depicted in the script for the 1958 adaptation of The 72 Tenants is intrinsically fictional for the sake of socialist aesthetics. The densely populated, mixed-class alleyways never actually fostered the strong sense of community and collective identity portrayed in the script.⁸ Furthermore, the common shanty towns of modern Shanghai, with their low-lying, scattered and dilapidated structures, presented a living ecology markedly different from the space represented in the film. The alley space has been transformed through multiple local adaptations in Hong Kong. The cramped garret tenement architecture of modern Shanghai has been reinterpreted as large-scale, open buildings in the style of Cantonese verandas. That is to say, this repeatedly reoccurring community dynamic was never intended as a rigorous representation of the realities of Shanghai, but as socialist realism that was meant to create a class-based identity. Rather, the Shanghai settings in Kung Fu Hustle serve merely as a superficial narrative framework, with their actual referent reflecting the accumulated local experiences in Hong Kong within several adaptations.

It is noteworthy that Kung Fu Hustle was filmed at the Shanghai Chedun film park, a location frequently selected by productions to depict modern-day China, particularly Shanghai. The park features a singular street designed to represent the prosperous, bustling, cosmopolitan essence of old Shanghai city, alongside a typical Republican-era villa, a church and several bell towers and structures. This constitutes a highly standardised cinematic scene that reflects a programmatic, and potentially superficial, conception of Shanghai’s modernity, functioning more as an empty signifier than as an accurate representation. Consequently, this filming location establishes a contrastive and reflective relationship between Shanghai and Hong Kong. The intrinsic voidness of the film’s setting further undermines the urban significance of Shanghai as a backdrop, effectively relegating it to a mere vessel for Hong Kong’s cinematic projections. In the film, Pig Sty Alley is portrayed as an expansive slum organised around leasing arrangements and inhabited entirely by impoverished members of the underclass. In terms of spatial reproduction, as Lefebvre articulated, social space is a social product that can be analysed through three dimensions: the physical space constructed by authorities and architects; the discursive space represented by public narratives surrounding this space; and the lived space intrinsically linked to individuals’ experiences.⁹ Ultimately, the essence of a given space is determined by its social history and the relationships it encompasses. It can be posited that the backdrop of Shanghai functions as an external signifier, whereas the cinematic space of Pig Sty Alley, despite not being a realist cultural artefact in relation to Shanghai, possesses the capacity to evoke the local lived experiences and collective cultural memories of Hong Kong.

Moreover, the local experiential references in Kung Fu Hustle evoke more specific associations with Hong Kong. In Cantonese, the term ‘Pig Sty’ carries rich connotations. On the one hand, it can refer to a bamboo cage used for housing or transporting pigs; on the other hand, it is associated with the Cantonese idiom jhu long ru shuei, which suggests that money flows into the pig cage like water, implying a continuous flow of wealth. This duality indicates that, while the living conditions in Pig Sty Alley are poor, the name also hints at the possibility of hidden opportunities. More importantly, the self-sufficient communal living ecology depicted in Pig Sty Alley bears a resemblance to that of the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong during the late twentieth century. Additionally, the phonetic similarity between jhu long and ‘Kowloon’ further underscores this connection.

The Kowloon Walled City once occupied a central position in British colonial Kowloon, spanning an area of six-and-a-half acres. It had originally been a military fortress enclosed by walls during the Qing dynasty, later becoming a battleground between the Chinese and British governments. By the first half of the twentieth century, the Kowloon Walled City had gradually transitioned to a more civilian character, with its fortified structure disappearing. However, the influx of massive waves of refugees from mainland China in the 1940s and 1950s turned it into a political no-man’s land.¹⁰ It was a space abandoned by all three governing authorities – the Hong Kong government dared not regulate it, the British government cared not to and the Chinese government had no authorisation to do so. The gloomy and damp physical environment bred drugs, prostitution and violence and was rife with opium dens, brothels and gambling parlours. The slum gradually morphed into a ‘city of darkness’ imbued with imagination and legend, notorious for its filth, crime and danger in the eyes of outsiders, despite most Hong Kongers never having set foot there and having no desire to. As Robert Ludlum described it:

The Walled City of Kowloon has no visible wall around it, yet it is as clearly defined as if there were one made of hard, high steel. It is instantly sensed by the crowded open market that runs along the street in front of the row of dark run-down flats – shacks haphazardly perched on top of one another, giving the impression that at any moment, the entire blighted complex will collapse under its own weight, leaving nothing but rubble where elevated rubble had stood.¹¹

The Kowloon Walled City has been extensively depicted in Hong Kong cinema, in films such as Brothers from the Walled City,¹² Long Arm of the Law¹³ and Crime Story.¹⁴ Since the demolition of the Walled City in the 1990s, there has been a renewed interest in this Chinese enclave. International films, including Ghost in the Shell,¹⁵ Batman Begins¹⁶ and Re-cycle¹⁷ have also highlighted its aesthetic features. The Kowloon Walled City has come to symbolise a sense of authenticity capable of countering the anxieties associated with urban life.

There is a relationship between media space and social space, where both exist in a bidirectional interactive relationship. Media space reflects social space to varying degrees while simultaneously constructing social space through a form of ‘imaginative’ agency.¹⁸ As Margaret Hillenbrand argues, in the context of modernity in East Asia, particularly within China, the city exists in opposition to the concept of ‘home’. ‘Individuals inherently struggle to harmonise with urban environments, the city of recent recall is almost never seen as a “place”, what Yi-fu Tuan so succinctly calls “enclosed and humanized space”, those “centres of felt value where biological needs … are met”, and which provide some kind of shelter and succour against the levelling blasts of modern life.¹⁹

In this regard, the Kowloon Walled City serves as a significant cultural symbol, embodying a form of subjectivity that resists the anxieties imposed by urban existence. ‘Precisely because the site is so hazardous and unattractive, it offers “protection” from rising land values in the city.’²⁰ Over 50,000 residents from diverse backgrounds lived in the Kowloon Walled City before its demolition, and it provided the most stable shelter for the poor and refugees. Geographically isolated from the main areas of Hong Kong and the Kowloon Peninsula, it was economically and culturally self-contained, operating outside the normal laws, authorities, taxes and order of regular society. The rampant private demolition and reconstruction resulted in a highly concentrated community of fused buildings, forming a self-sustaining ecosystem, with housing, schools, stores, temples, altars, churches, hospitals and all the necessary infrastructure for life.²¹

It can thus be argued that both the Kowloon Walled City and Pig Sty Alley are constructed through a similarly imaginative agency. The Walled City challenged the dichotomy between rural and urban spaces, asserting an autonomy that embodies what Michel Foucault termed ‘heterotopias’.²² This notion is mirrored in Kung Fu Hustle, where Pig Sty Alley is depicted from a camera perspective that reveals its openness to the outside while simultaneously presenting an impenetrable, fortress-like quality, with its rear never fully visible. The film showcases the residents and employs sweeping shots of the landlord couple, providing a panoramic view of their lives and social relationships that extends beyond mere tenancy. They unite as a collective to protect one another when necessary, identifying as members of the Pig Sty Alley community. In the face of external threats, the landlord couple assume the role of guardians, while ordinary residents strive to maintain communal order; as a character asserts to Sing, ‘I am not afraid. You can kill me. But there will be thousands more of me.’²³

Simultaneously, the film presents a nebulous portrayal of the outside world as a metropolis, which merely embodies a survival-of-the-fittest ethos and a morally corrupt social environment. Not only is this ambiguous emotional value system perceived by the protagonist, Sing; it also reflects a broader Sinophone collective cultural consciousness. When individuals experience estrangement and heterogeneity in their contemporary context, this perception is articulated through spatial constructs, reshaping past spaces into places that can support original conditions of existence. Consequently, the demolition of the Kowloon Walled City in the 1990s becomes intricately linked to a nostalgic sentiment regarding Hong Kong, particularly in light of the dramatic transformations experienced after 1997.

Different social relations bring about different natures of social space. As Lefebvre observed:

there is an immediate relationship between the body and its space. Between the body’s deployment in space and its occupation of space. This is a truly remarkable relationship: the body with the energies at its disposal, the living body, creates or produces its own space; conversely, the laws of space, which is to say the laws of discrimination in space, also govern the living body and the deployment of its energies.²⁴

From the perspective of communal ecology and architectural form, Pig Sty Alley evokes the lived experiences of the many marginalised residents who once inhabited places like the Kowloon Walled City in twentieth-century Hong Kong. The open gateway of the Walled City invites the formation of a collective identity. In this manner, the signifier of Shanghai in Kung Fu Hustle completes its journey to the signified Hong Kong.

Making heterotopia: kung fu as the narrative logic of intertextual nostalgia

The cinematic portrayal of Pig Sty Alley represents a creative interpretation of urban space and local culture. This creativity is manifested in the film’s approach, which does not simply appropriate past visual materials or directly imitate reality but rather borrows from the ‘other’ to express its own vision. Furthermore, the cultural symbols in Kung Fu Hustle do not lead to a critique of social reality and political culture. At its core, the film conveys a universal, simple humanistic ideal, as well as a basic concern for time.

As mentioned earlier, Foucault proposed the concept of heterotopia. This concept can be used to capture the residential ecology of the Kowloon Walled City prior to its demolition. More importantly, the essence of Foucault’s spatial concept is to demonstrate that space is not a pre-existing given but rather a product of human practice. Heterotopia, as the ‘otherspace’, points to the existence of spaces that differ from the so-called normal and conventional spaces (such as cities, villages and highlands). These heterotopias have their own operational logic and order, and also contain different senses of time or history, known as ‘heterochronies’. Examining these marginal heterotopian spaces can unveil many of the power structures that are typically obscured in everyday life. This theoretical framework can also effectively explain the film’s construction of the space of Pig Sty Alley. In this cinematic space, kung fu is the element that leads to and resolves crises, and the kung fu masters display their skills here. It can be said that kung fu is the narrative logic that underpins the heterotopian nature of this cinematic world.

Kung Fu Hustle was designed to appeal to the global market, so it aimed to enhance the comprehension of non-Cantonese native speakers by reducing the amount of dialogue and instead driving the narrative through action and montage. For instance, in the second scene following the opening Axe Gang massacre of the Crocodile Gang, the film employs parallel montages – gang members leisurely dancing with axes while the Axe Gang commits murder and robbery. This scene has no dialogue, but it effectively illustrates the Axe Gang’s behaviour, providing a prelude to the subsequent narrative, and simultaneously imbues the film with a darkly comedic texture that becomes the overall stylistic approach.

The film achieved global commercial success. With a domestic gross of $17,108,591 and an international gross of $87,773,854, Kung Fu Hustle has maintained a strong reputation across the world to this day.²⁵ The reason for its success lies in its refusal to be beholden to a singular cultural framework. Instead, the film weaves together a tapestry of diverse cultural elements. For example, the Axe Gang is a composite of its historical prototype from 1920s Shanghai and the Italian mafia. Several shots creatively incorporate elements from classic films like The Matrix²⁶ and The Shining.²⁷ While ostensibly a ‘kung fu’ film, Kung Fu Hustle departs from the visual conventions and narrative traditions of its Sinophone predecessors, which tended to emphasise action and masculinity. Kung fu in this film is distinct from Bruce Lee’s ‘Chinese dragon’ persona; John Woo, Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan’s ‘gangsta kung fu’ and martial comedy; and the shadow of Hong Kong’s Chang Cheh-style martial arts films. Even for Stephen Chow, the film diverges from his well-known mo lei tau (nonsensical) comedic style that found widespread popularity in China and East Asia in the 1990s.²⁸

However, after stripping away these iconic elements of Chinese action cinema, concerns arose about the perceived ‘loss of Chineseness’. For example, Dumas argues that, for global and transnational audiences, the ‘personal, intellectual, political spirit of kung fu has been disavowed’²⁹ as Sing transitions from rebelling against authority to affirming it after acquiring martial skills, and kung fu becomes reduced to a Western pop culture stereotype of mystery and the supernatural. This anxiety accompanies the global dissemination of Kung Fu Hustle and reflects an unconscious tendency to conflate Chineseness with certain recognisable cinematic signifiers. But looking beyond these symbols reveals that Sing’s talent is not aligned with power or violence; rather, it stands in opposition to them, representing the civilian culture of kung fu embodied by the residents of Pig Sty Alley, who fight against the violent power of the Axe Gang in the lawless space.

In this film, kung fu transcends mere action and masculinity and instead represents a universal, transcendent and simple humanistic logic. It is an interlocking chain of associations: ‘Kung fu – Good guys (humanism) – Pig Sty Alley – The relationship of mutual protection and help – Childhood dreams – Peace’ versus ‘Violence – Bad guys – The Axe Gang – Killing and distrust – Confrontations’. Ultimately, the film upholds the former while sensitising the viewer to the latter. It achieves this outcome not by shaping the setting of Shanghai into a martial arts world but by making kung fu a ubiquitous presence in everyday life, through which it maintains social order. This order establishes an idealised realm for the entire film. From the perspective of Zen Buddhism, the silent shot of Sing ascending to the sky, seeing the Buddha and realising the Buddhist Palm technique can be interpreted as a depiction of the ‘other shore’ (Bi An), a symbolic attainment of righteousness and enlightenment.

It is evident that the film presents two spaces and two orders, along with the values they each represent. When Sing recalls his childhood experience of being cheated and mocked while learning the Buddhist Palm, he comments, ‘I realized then that good guys never win. I want to be bad. I want to be the killer.’³⁰ But at the film’s conclusion it is this very kung fu, the Buddhist Palm, that becomes the key to defeating the Axe Gang’s violence and reuniting Sing with his childhood love. This refutes Dumas’s claim that Sing’s talent aligns him with violence – rather, it empowers him to moderate and harness violence in order to maintain the social and spatial order of Pig Sty Alley. As Sing tells his opponent, ‘If you want to learn, I’ll teach you.’³¹ The ending of Kung Fu Hustle witnesses the triumph not of martial arts but of childhood dreams – a naive, yet moral vision that resonates across diverse backgrounds as a universally accepted humanistic ideal.

In depicting Pig Sty Alley, a world where kung fu masters lurk everywhere, the film intentionally downplays the well-known dark aspects of physical counterparts such as the Kowloon Walled City. The gloomy, copper-tinted buildings, caused by chronic lack of sunlight, are portrayed as a relatively clean, orderly environment. While drugs, cigarettes, thieves and prostitutes are present, they are only subtly referenced and not overtly emphasised. The focus remains firmly on kung fu, highlighting its inherent logic. In this way, kung fu becomes a vehicle for expressing nostalgia for Hong Kong. Transcending the Kowloon Walled City, Pig Sty Alley embodies a longing for the idealised glorification of childhood and the old Hong Kong. From this perspective, kung fu represents a psychological space underlying the cultural milieu, where it constitutes the social order, resolves conflicts and functions as an idealised realm – a humanism higher than the capacity for human destruction, with the power of this justice secretly permeating the environment. As evident during the film’s opening sequences, the three kung fu masters are gradually introduced, with their weapons, powers, iron rings and long poles emphasised through visual cues, which foreshadows the eventual demonstrations of their kung fu prowess.

These hidden kung fu masters are both an ideal and a reality of Hong Kong. In the 1930s, the southern town of Foshan was renowned for martial arts and, owing to wartime displacement, many practitioners migrated to Hong Kong, opening sects, establishing schools and accepting students, gradually transforming the city into a kung fu hub³² as seen in films like Ip Man³³ and The Grandmaster.³⁴ These individuals often had other professions, such as doctors or opera performers. The 1950s saw a surge in kung fu’s popularity owing to poor social security and the rise of martial arts literature, followed by 1970s Hong Kong New Wave cinema and the proliferation of kung fu films, TV dramas, magazines, comics and novels.

As Andreas Huyssen has noted, ‘nostalgic longing for a past is always also a longing for another place … temporality and spatiality are necessarily linked in nostalgic desire’.³⁵ This can also be described as ‘past-as-place’. Kung fu serves as the connective thread between the real and the fictional and the historical and the cinematic, becoming a potential gateway to transcend the ceaseless march of time. At the film’s conclusion, the residents of Pig Sty Alley continue their rhythms on the street, while Sing and his childhood sweetheart revert to their youthful appearances and the martial arts huckster resumes swindling. This could be interpreted as a hint that the entire film is Sing’s imaginative dream about kung fu. The film becomes a vehicle to reconstruct a better, idealised space and to rescue all those drowning in the relentless flow of time, creating a city of ‘fin-de-siècle splendor’.³⁶

Nostalgia as a structure of feeling: Shanghai as the other of Hong Kong

In the previous sections, the spatial expressions of Kung Fu Hustle and their translation in the context of Hong Kong, alongside their local projections onto the Kowloon Walled City, have been explored. Although the film recontextualises the story of The House of 72 Tenants within the Shanghai narrative, the actual representation of Shanghai it conveys is quite limited. Conversely, through the logic of kung fu, the film effectively references Hong Kong, intertwining the reconstruction of cinematic space with the imagination of historical space, thereby resonating with local nostalgic sentiments.

Nostalgia is a complex concept that has been prevalent since the Cold War. It often reflects an anxiety related to sociopolitical turmoil or disorientation. Consequently, nostalgia for the past in Shanghai emerged earlier than that for Hong Kong. The global nostalgia for Shanghai that began in the 1990s is characterised by a longing for colonial Shanghai in the 1930s. In Wang Anyi’s I Love Bill, the protagonist, A San, yearns for a vague, modern vision of Shanghai that embodies the prosperity of modern Shanghai in that era.³⁷ This form of nostalgia does not necessarily lead to a genuine historical understanding; rather, it may be more closely aligned with Arjun Appadurai’s concept of ‘armchair nostalgia’,³⁸ becoming a cultural product that can quickly elicit emotional resonance. A recent example of this phenomenon is the popular Shanghai-dialect television series Blossoms Shanghai,³⁹ which has gained significant traction in China over the past two years.⁴⁰

As Hillenbrand notes, the nostalgia that began to permeate East Asia in the late twentieth century can be understood as ‘what Raymond Williams famously called “structures of feeling”: those social experiences that are “in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available”’.⁴¹ It is this collective structure of feeling that lays the groundwork for the mutual otherness of Shanghai and Hong Kong, allowing each to reference the other within its own context and facilitating the possibility of nostalgic expression.

The practice of Hong Kong cinema referencing Shanghai has a long and storied history. With the aid of Kung Fu Hustle, it can be found that Hong Kong has established its own unique cultural consciousness by continuously reinventing the memory of modern Shanghai. When Shanghai directors began migrating south in the 1940s, they brought with them Shanghai’s filmmakers, resources and film industry, as well as a portion of the city’s memories and cultural expressions. As noted by scholar Tao Su, ‘Hong Kong, as a narrative backdrop, is an empty signifier, and the Shanghai filmmaking tradition is still what the post-war directors who relocated yearn for’.⁴²

In Eileen Chang’s screenplay for Long Live the Mistress!,⁴³ even after half a century of development over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Hong Kong continues to rely on Shanghai as a means of self-expression. In In the Mood for Love,⁴⁴ the fashions, language and lifestyles of 1960s Hong Kong are imbued with Shanghai’s distinct imprint, revealing the real historical landscape of that period of southward migration. Similarly, Stanley Kwan’s ‘Shanghai Trilogy’ (Center Stage,⁴⁵ Red Rose White Rose,⁴⁶ Everlasting Regret)⁴⁷ and Rouge⁴⁸ not only feature explicit Shanghai narratives but also echo the global nostalgia for Shanghai in the 1990s, pointing to a contemporary desire to reconstruct the prosperous economic market of the early twentieth century.

This cultural intertwining was articulated by Leo Lee, who proposed the two fundamental perspectives of Hong Kong as the other of Shanghai, and Shanghai as the other of Hong Kong. In the first half of the twentieth century, when Hong Kong lacked a sufficiently developed local culture, it was seen as an unwanted colonial backwater, constantly criticised and scrutinised by Shanghai. This mirrors Eileen Chang’s depiction of Hong Kong’s architecture and lifestyles as imbued with a sense of Orientalist absurdity. However, after the influx of refugees from the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s, which brought various Shanghai business and cultural elites to Hong Kong along with their industries, funding and social order, Hong Kong rapidly surpassed Shanghai in film production, though this was subject to mainland cultural censorship and political battles in the ensuing decades. Having undergone a process of ‘Shanghainization’ in the first half of the twentieth century, Hong Kong has established its own distinct local consciousness through its continual reinvention of Shanghai’s memory. As Liang Bingyi once observed, ‘Hong Kong was developed by the colonial government with “borrowed time” and “borrowed space” … It cannot be compared to Paris, Washington, Shanghai, or Beijing, which have a national or cultural concept and have developed organically with their geographical environments (seaports or rivers).’⁴⁹

While wartime Shanghai cannot be considered a colonial city in the same way as Hong Kong, the driving role of economic interests in shaping their respective urban cultures and everyday lives is remarkably similar. The pursuit of high-risk, high-reward ventures, defended through violence as depicted by cinematic icons like gangs, guns, money and killings, has left both urban landscapes portrayed in films as hypocritical, corrupt and beholden to market forces. The hugely popular The Bund⁵⁰ series, set in gang-ridden 1980s Hong Kong exemplifies this aesthetic. The striking parallels between the two cities during their economic and cultural heydays grant them the legitimacy to serve as proxies for one another. As Sing declares when deciding to join the Axe Gang, ‘The streets are filled with money and women. You just need the will and determination to seize the opportunity. That’s our big chance! We just need to kill someone, and we’re in the gang. Then it’s money and women all the way!’ This worldview is precisely what Kung Fu Hustle sets out to overcome through the power of kung fu.

In elevating the significance of Pig Sty Alley, Kung Fu Hustle transcends the mere evocation of Hong Kong or Shanghai. It taps into a shared nostalgia, expressed more acutely through the cinematic lens of Hong Kong at that moment, encompassing both grand narratives and individual experiences – a dual nostalgia. As observed in Shanghai Modern,

Tsui Hark’s Shanghai by Night⁵¹ consciously imitates the earlier film Crossroads,⁵² but the ‘reinvention of the feel and shape of characteristic objects of an older period’ does not simply ‘reawaken a sense of the past.’ For Tsui Hark, Shanghai serves as a prop or set, made more artificial by the primitive conditions of the filmmaking, yet seized upon as a way to reflect on the symbolic linkage between the two cities through semiotic self-reflexivity.⁵³

Further,

If this distinction [between] ‘space as perceived, conceived and lived’ were generally applied, we should have to look at history itself in a new light. We should have to study not only the history of space, but also the history of representations, along with that of their relationships with each other, with practice and with ideology.⁵⁴

In the context of the 1997 Hong Kong handover, nostalgia emerged as a prominent discourse reflecting widespread anxiety regarding the city’s future. The year 1997 served as a looming deadline, now met, yet with Hong Kong residents remaining haunted by the inexorable passage of time resonating with the fin-de-siècle splendour of Shanghai. Both old Shanghai and the ephemeral Hong Kong have come to be viewed as fallen cities – irretrievable and reliant on one another for representation. This phenomenon elucidates why old Shanghai continues to occupy a significant place in Hong Kong cinema and is often portrayed as the ‘city at the end of time’.⁵⁵ It is within this framework that Kung Fu Hustle, while invoking kung fu for the nostalgic expression of private experience, is also able to evoke a collective structure of nostalgia through its cinematic construction of space.

Conclusion

This article has examined how Kung Fu Hustle, based on its prototype The House of 72 Tenants, shapes the space of Pig Sty Alley and how this construction references reality through nostalgia as a structure of feeling, thereby endowing the hollow narrative of Shanghai with tangible local experiences and historical significance from Hong Kong. Moreover, the establishment, destruction and restoration of cinematic space represent a revival of a premodern humanitarian order, signifying an effort to salvage personal histories over time and to poeticise and universalise the past, thus resisting the anxieties and disillusionments of the present. The commercial success of this film serves as validation for the universality of such nostalgic sentiments.

Jonathan Raban regards films as the ‘soft city’ that ‘the city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture’.⁵⁶ Film, as a form of mass media and auteur art, warrants further exploration of its close relationship with architecture, urbanity and history.

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Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently blind the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.