Too Much Reality? Reflections on the EducationalObservational Film World of Tammy Cheung and Augustine Lam

Too Much Reality? Reflections on the EducationalObservational Film World of Tammy Cheung and Augustine Lam

“[H]uman kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” as the bird observes in “Burnt Norton,” the first of T. S. Eliot's four-part poem sequence, Four Quartets, giving the reader a bird's-eye perspective on human behavior. Tammy Cheung has expressed a similar viewpoint in respect of Hong Kong film audiences and their taste for escapist cinema in a number of interviews she has given since coming to prominence as one of the city's most admired and respected documentarians.1 She and her cinematographer and partner, Augustine Lam, have been directing the gaze of their observational-cinema-mode camera on Hong Kong as a civic society for two decades now, and the images are not always flattering. Employing a direct, fly-on-the-wall cinematography unmediated by spoken narrative or voice-over commentary, the pair see their role as documentarians to do precisely that—to document events and allow the viewer to interpret or judge for her- or himself. While Cheung and Lam's work is critically and academically admired, and has been significant in the overall context of Hong Kong's post-millennial independent documentary development, the pair are aware that their films have not reached the wider audiences that the subject matter would seem to merit.