Hail the Spectator: Embodiment, Injustice, and Film
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Marco Wan
Marco Wan is Professor, and Director of the Law and Literary Studies Programme, at the Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong. His first book,
Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction , was awarded the Penny Pether Prize from the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia. His second book,Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ , recently appeared with Cambridge University Press. He is Managing Editor ofLaw & Literature .
Abstract
How does film move us into caring about injustice, and what role do the qualities specific to the medium play in the process? In this article, I provide an answer to these questions by building on ideas about embodied spectatorship from film studies. I argue that the haptic nature of certain cinematic images can trigger a sensuous, corporeal response to unjust acts and processes in their viewers, and thereby cultivate in them a commitment to justice. I will anchor my argument through a close reading of Wong Jing’s Hail the Judge, a Hong Kong comedy about a woman who is framed for the murder of her family.
About the author
Marco Wan is Professor, and Director of the Law and Literary Studies Programme, at the Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong. His first book, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction, was awarded the Penny Pether Prize from the Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia. His second book, Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, recently appeared with Cambridge University Press. He is Managing Editor of Law & Literature.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction: Law in End Times: A North/South Collaboration
- Focus: Law in End Times
- The Judgment as Revelation
- ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’: Tracing Faust’s Influences on Giorgio Agamben to and from International Law
- The Embodiment of Law: Altered Carbon and Six Wakes
- Hail the Spectator: Embodiment, Injustice, and Film
- Politics of Silence: On Autonomous, Communicative and Aesthetic Silences
- Research
- “The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s Anthropophagic Architecture as Cultural Criticism
- Intervention
- A (Lay) Catholic Voice Against a National Consensus
- Book Reviews
- Jani McCutcheon and Fiona McGaughey: Research Handbook on Art and Law
- Conor McCarthy: Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction: Law in End Times: A North/South Collaboration
- Focus: Law in End Times
- The Judgment as Revelation
- ‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’: Tracing Faust’s Influences on Giorgio Agamben to and from International Law
- The Embodiment of Law: Altered Carbon and Six Wakes
- Hail the Spectator: Embodiment, Injustice, and Film
- Politics of Silence: On Autonomous, Communicative and Aesthetic Silences
- Research
- “The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s Anthropophagic Architecture as Cultural Criticism
- Intervention
- A (Lay) Catholic Voice Against a National Consensus
- Book Reviews
- Jani McCutcheon and Fiona McGaughey: Research Handbook on Art and Law
- Conor McCarthy: Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature
