Cinephile Culture as Infrastructure

Cinephilia in Hong Kong has served as a vital site for cultural mobilization and political engagement, inviting participation in various cinematic forms to generate new questions about the media as such. Cinephile culture played a pivotal role in reorienting and cultivating alternative mediascapes and intellectual networks in Hong Kong from the 1960s to the 1980s, a period defined by colonial governance and cultural Cold War. Hong Kong’s cinephile culture should be regarded as an “infrastructure,” defined in terms of discursive-material relationships that converge in the production, reception, and circulation of cinema. Drawing from the framework of critical infrastructure studies, this article conceives cinephilia in terms of material culture and processes of sociotechnical mediation, identifying vital junctures where film culture comes into being by means of the technological apparatus of cinema, the agency of human and nonhuman beings (including amateur creators, film critics, cameras, publications, and physical sites), and the intricate interactions between them.