CITY ON FIRE: Hong Kong Cinema, by Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover. London: Verso, Sept. 1999, 372 pp., $22 (paper).

It began as a buzzing, multicultural confusion. The year is 1909. Hong Kong's cinema is born with a silent effort titled "Stealing the Roasted Duck." It is the handiwork of Liang Shaobo, the famous Shanghai-based director. So far, so good.

In a masterstroke of timing, however, the film is finished before the colony's first movie theater opens. That won't happen until 1910. But, before it does, Benjamin Brodsky, the film's American financier, returns to the United States, taking the only print with him. As a result, Hong Kong's first step into cinematic history is not shown in the British colony.

Since that fateful moment in 1909, the buzz and the chaos of the Hong Kong film industry have never ceased. Take, for example, the so-called "seven-day wonders" that dominated Cantonese cinema after World War II. These were films produced in a week with "little direction, minimal sets and prerecorded sound" for single-week runs in the colony's cinemas.