11 - Hong Kong and Athens: Contested Spaces of the Global and the Local in the Neo-Noir of John Woo and Alexis Alexiou

Summary

Noir as the Contested Intersection between the Global and the Local

Since its inception, the production of film noir in the US context has drawn thematic and aesthetic inspiration from European and other world cinemas; in return, the noir elements, established by US noir, have also had a significant impact on European and world cinemas. Like a chain reaction, these European and world cinemas, which once found inspiration in Anglo-American film noir, would invigorate Hollywood neo-noir later on. This is what Fay and Nieland (2009: 9, 68, 109) call ‘global film noir’, and what Desser (2003: 516) calls ‘global noir’.

Through this lens, John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Alexis Alexiou's Tetarti 04:45/Wednesday 04:45 (2015) form an interesting pair of examples that can be used to look into the dynamics between the global and the local within the genre framework. An almost three-decade gap separates their creation, but there is a remarkable affinity between the two films. On the one hand, Alexiou pays tribute to John Woo. On the other, as I argue in this chapter, this affinity can be read as a strategy on Alexiou's part to connect with international neo-noir, and to relate the local concerns of Greek noir to global ones; this affiliation through noir demonstrates global interdependencies theorised by Sassen (2001: 267), Appadurai (1996: 32–5) and Featherstone (1996: 65) under the term ‘the global’, as well as Hardt and Negri's ‘Empire’ (2000: 39).

While reflecting on these two films’ temporal-spatial intersection between the local and the global in the background, this chapter will discuss transcultural and local aspects of A Better Tomorrow and Wednesday 04:45, as well as the globalised noir space. I will first contextualise both films in their respective sociopolitical and economic conditions. I will also discuss the films’ interaction with noir aesthetics and genre conventions, before moving on to examine the proliferation of non-places in Hong Kong and Athens, and the creation of globalised cities.

Film noir as a term as well as its scope have long been contested (Park 2011: 2; Schrader [1972] 2003: 230; Bordwell 1998: 77). The term was coined in the early post-war years by French critics Nino Frank (1946) and Jean-Pierre Chartier (1946);