This week, Film Notes publishes an essay by Linda Chiu-han Lai accompanying A City in Transmission, an online program of works by five Hong Kong video artists presented on e-flux Film in collaboration with Videotage. Lai writes from her experience as an artist, curator, teacher, and researcher, bringing her own practice into conversation with works in the program. Reflecting on Hong Kong between 2019 and 2021, Lai questions how images of street conflict came to dominate representations of the city, obscuring other experiences and histories. She approaches “essaying” as a process of thinking through images and sounds, in which an artist’s understanding develops through working with the material. The following edited excerpt turns to Ellen Pau’s Diversion (1990), examining how footage of an earlier Hong Kong acquires new emotional and political meanings through montage of images and sound.
Essaying with sight-and-sound points to specific questions of truth methods and knowledge claims. As lens-based creativity remains vibrant, these questions remain basic: What is in a shot, how does it function, and what kind of knowledge is produced?
A key aspect is the “cut” that defines a shot. A well-known experimental response is to dethrone continuity editing via the method of “montage,” highlighting the rich potentials of individual shots. Ellen Pau’s Diversion (1990) shows how she radicalizes sight-and-sound narratives via her “cutting” game. In this work, the fragments of cross-harbor swimmers move through four phases of communication. In the beginning, such shots indicate the actual sports event as if it were once again happening in front of the viewer (the illusion and transparency theses); but as these shots repeat with manipulation, they become codes of emotions (code thesis); and as they repeat with variations, they become the token of the inexpressible emotions (recognition thesis) that motivate the work. This takes us back to the Chinese title of the work, which means “You can't reach the shore at both ends,” uttered in a moment of anticipation of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule. Curiously, did the footage of the swimming event (from the 1960s) provoke Pau’s felt anxiety? Or did Pau “find” a perfect match for her feeling of not getting anywhere, with these images made available to her in a video workshop she joined?
Montage is liberating. This is as true of images as of sounds. The idea of the “sound image” concerns sound liberated from a supporting role and forming a world of its own. We might call such arrangements of visual and sonic fragments “concrete video,” a materialist approach derived from musique concrète.
Read the full essay on e-flux Film Notes.
Watch City in Transmission online on e-flux Film through September 30, 2026.
