ABSTRACT
This chapter is an extension of my monograph Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (2019). In this book, I propose the use of the term “extraterritoriality” as a way to rethink how Hong Kong cinema and media negotiate the city’s biopolitical lives. In this chapter, I propose a variation of this term: extratemporality. I argue that in a postsocialist control society, the current mode of media ecology – or media existence – is best understood as a technosocial assemblage in which microperceptual (between intuition and perception) and microtemporal (between the extinction and initiation of each point-instant) engagements actively rewrite a layout of political relationalities. These microperceptions and microtemporal point-instants in turn define and rewrite the mutually conflicting political positions from one moment to another. In the chapter, I first reexamine the relationalities between media, governmentality, and social movements. I then study the documentary Inside the Red Brick Wall. This documentary captures how the police and the protesters are engaged in making microperceptual and microtemporal decisions and actions in a political struggle. But at the same time, the documentary as an “older” cinematic format slows down, stretches out, and makes tangible how these decisions and actions are carried out.
