ABSTRACT
This article is an analysis of Yau Nai-Hoi's film Eye in the Sky, a detective thriller set in present-day Hong Kong, which was viewed at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. The article is situated by the author's experience of viewing. Just as the author was continuously involved in timing his movements within the rush of the city of Berlin, one of the film's main protagonists, the head of a theft ring, was also busy timing Hong Kong's movements. The author's film experience thus involved movement from one fraught temporal habitus to another. In addition, both the city that was the locus of the author's viewing and the city of the film are newly reconfigured. Berlin, now a unified national capital after a significant political reorientation, is full of large corporate and government buildings as well as large consumption emporiums in places that were once quite different. And Berlin's reconfiguration, like Hong Kong's, has taken place in a highly politicized context — in Berlin's case, an attempt at an architecture of civil society, of public space and of “democratic transparency”, in order to reorient the problem of Germanness, while Hong Kong is also involved in an identity problematic, its relationship with Chineseness.
