Film bleu: the development of cinematic aesthetics and disavowal of cultural traditions in Hong Kong crime cinema

ABSTRACT This essay revisits a period (from the early 1980s to early 2000s) in the history of Hong Kong film through the perspective of ‘film bleu’ and traces a brief and roughly chronological history of Hong Kong film bleu. In the early stages of the development of the film bleu aesthetic in local cinema, red was nearly as prominent as blue, whereas the blue–red scheme has largely been replaced by a monochromatic blue tone in more recent ‘bluish’ films. This essay reveals how a blue–red color and lighting scheme gradually gave way to a blue-dominated one and how blue was developed as a generic and cinematic convention in Hong Kong crime films. It propounds that, in addition to efforts to develop idiosyncratic generic conventions, the film bleu aesthetic in post-Handover Hong Kong cinema reflects a detached attitude toward and even a disavowal of both contemporary and traditional Chinese cultures.