Limbo and the Evidence of Film: Jean-Luc Nancy and cinema beyond representation

Abstract

The paper analyzes Limbo, a film by Soi Cheang, a leading figure in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, aiming to comprehend, through it, the key aspects of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on the cinematic image. Following characters such as investigators Cham Lau and Will Ren among Hong Kong’s inequality and urban chaos, we aim to understand the sense in which, proceeding from Nancy’s analytic perspective, we can find in cinema the possibility of creating an image as potency and as something capable of evincing a real that is printed on the tenuous edges of a thin skin. An image beyond representation, that would show cinema’s capacity to reveal the kinetic in its raw state. Thus, through Soi Cheang’s work, in its dialogue with the French philosopher’s views on cinema, we hope to reflect on the very opening of meaning as a potential of contemporary cinematography and on the rupture of borders between western and eastern ways of thinking about image.