Standing in sharp contrast to the predominantly journalistic, expository or verite documentaries which Hong Kong is recognised for producing, is one of its rare experimental, essayistic documentaries. Anson Hoi Shan Mak's highly idiosyncratic filmic record of a quasi-Bloomian pilgrimage through traditional districts of Hong Kong, entitled One Way Street on a Turntable (2007), premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2007 to mixed critical reviews.
As Timothy Corrigan has implicitly acknowledged in his recent book on essay films, it is an important contribution to recent documentary critical discourse. By privileging Mak's work and placing it in the company of such essay films as those of Bunuel, Marker, Godard and Wenders, Corrigan is surely paying tribute to its qualities as a thought-provoking and original documentary piece. He notes:
Essayistic explorations of space have examined exotic lands and local neighbourhoods, moved across distant jungles, wandered the crowded space of cities … Anson Hoi Shan Mak's One Way Street on a Turntable works to locate itself between movement and ‘rootedness’, permeated by reflections on Walter Benjamin. (Corrigan 2011: 105)
With Corrigan's fresh study of the genre in mind, it is pertinent to consider definitions and characteristics of the essay film. As with the literary essay, the cinematic essay permits a wide-ranging field for its subject matter, and, far from avoiding what would have been considered stylistic dissonances in the past, frequently embraces them. A typical essayistic film thus adopts a deliberate strategy of discontinuity and truncation (for example, the use of separately titled episodes or chapters) in preference to the seamless narrative continuity of much commercial cinema. Still designated in generic terms as ‘documentary cinema’, despite the inadequacy of this broad classification in accommodating such a radical form, the film essay has evolved into a plural, crossover form in its own right.
Like the traditional mainstream documentary, the essay film often focuses on specific issue(s), rather than a fictional plot. In his notes on the cinematic essay, Peter Thompson asserts that straight documentary makers concentrate on the ‘subject’, which is more ‘passive’ than the ‘active subject’ of the fiction film. By contrast, film essayists opt to treat the subject as a theme ‘in which the subject is a particular development or an interpretation of that theme, and one that has a determining influence upon the form of the film’ (Thompson 2005: 5).