Although critics nowadays talk about global noir or neo-noir (that means the revived genre does not even carry any technical cinematic features as the classic noir possesses) from various localised contexts in the age of transnationalism, the concept of film noir in cinema, at a first glance, is typically a very Euro(America)-centric way of classifying, perceiving and organising cinematic productions, which is, of course, an integral part of the hegemonic western conceptualisation or mapping of the world, subjugating widely different peoples and their cultures to parallel – if not ‘universal’ – historical paths of modernity. However, noir as a guiding concept to generalise, group and identify the multitude of diverse different films is itself a false recognition of post-war French viewers on Hollywood cinema. It is actually not a conscious category developed from Hollywood industry but a critical object invented by French criticism in order to allow Europeans ‘to love the United States while criticizing it’. While noir may designate the tensions (within the west) and the paradoxical relationships between Europe and the United States, thus debunking the myth of a homogeneous west, can it then be justifiably appropriated to look at the cultures of the non-west?

If the notion of noir as an ‘external misperception’ may create an entirely new perspective ‘invisible to those who are directly engaged in it’ and exert some ‘productive influence on the misperceived “original” itself ‘, what is the ‘positive’ effect noir can bring to our understanding of Hong Kong cinematic productions? What is the so-called hidden truth – which is supposed not to be seen without such notion – of Hong Kong cinema unfolded through the introduction of noir as a critical concept? But, once again, will such an argument using a ‘distorting outside gaze’ to reveal one's ‘repressed inner truth’ simply reinforce the legitimacy of western hegemony and violence in the transnational and transcultural milieu? Isn't it true that the western conceptual framework has already dominated today's film study? Perhaps what is at stake is not whether noir is an ‘external’ concept or not, but rather the instability and fluidity of the concept itself that generates a dynamic relationship with the object to be looked at, that is Hong Kong cinema, and allows the object to have a more proactive role to respond to the conceptual gaze.