Hong Kong on screen: cross-representations of films and video games

This article explores representations of Hong Kong in contemporary film and video productions. Using the tools of cultural and visual geography, it proposes a cross-analysis of 26 films and 12 video games produced between 1982 and 2023, showing how their staging of Hong Kong configures differentiated aesthetic, narrative and spatial regimes of territorialization. This comparative approach makes it possible to grasp both aesthetic continuities and media specificities in the production of spatial imaginaries, emphasizing how each medium articulates power and territory differently, and what each reveals or obscures about the city’s geographical characteristics. The study identifies three main trends: the creation of an exogenous cliché centred on the spectacular verticality of the skyline; the aestheticisation of a labyrinthine, overcrowded night-time urban landscape; and the valorization of peripheral or marginal spaces, often associated with alternative, endogenous representations of the territory. A cross-analysis of films and video games reveals distinct regimes of visibility − filmic framing versus interactive spatialization − and enables us to question the relationship between aesthetic forms, political power and territorial imaginaries. By placing these representations in their geopolitical context, it sheds light on the role of cultural media in the making, and the contestation, of contemporary urban imaginaries.