ABSTRACT
Like many popular Mandarin films made in Hong Kong during the 1950s, the 1959 Motion Picture and General Investment Company Production Air Hostess, written and directed by Evan Yang, stages tensions between traditional culture and contrary modes of behavior attendant to an embrace of modernity and modern life. Air Hostess provides a telling example of the incarnation of the modern and modernist aesthetics that invites a reading of the modern as disciplinary and mechanical as well as liberating, because commercial air travel allowed women to escape traditional roles of domestic compliance. Air Hostess invites the consideration of "atmosphere" as a spatial dimension defined not only as landscape but also anchored by the performance of "atmosphere", in the terminology for bit players or extras. Atmosphere can also signify the emotive quality of a certain place. In Air Hostess, the prevailing mood of the various locations is one of exuberant freedom from traditional norms and the cosmopolitan experience defined by air travel.
