Reading Eileen Chang with Ann Hui: Filming Hong Kong in Love After Love (original) (raw)
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film about Hong Kong lesbians told from a lesbian/feminist perspective. Yau Ching’s road to filmmaking shows how Hong Kong’s vibrant alternative film and video culture can nurture innovation, strengthen ties to the world filmmaking community, and involve Hong Kong filmmakers in the expansion of the public sphere for the marginalized, maligned, and dispossessed. The story of its production also highlights the connections between Hong Kong independent cinema and international trends in queer counter-cinemas. In this interview, Yau Ching talks about her development as a filmmaker, her inspiration for Ho Yuk, its production, and its impact on local as well global audiences. 14 Interview with Yau Ching: Filming Women in Hong Kong’s Queerscape
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As a genre of mass media, the romance movie has the potential to influence and shape audience’s views on socio-cultural issues of the time (Rahman, 2013). Asian romance movies often depict behaviours that challenge thei moral code such as obeying authority, adherence to cultural norms and putting society before self. For dramatic effect, such movies would often showcase scandalous themes and socially objectionable behaviours which are eventually resolved, indicating a return to socially accepted codes of conduct. There is a clear appreciation of values considered ideal in romantic partnerships including honesty and fidelity. Interestingly, such movies appear to capture the Asian diaspora, challenging social norms and negotiating its values, behaviours and beliefs against foreign elements. This article explores the scandals and consequences portrayed in some of these Asian movies, evaluating the effect this might have on their actors and a receptive audience. Elements of scandal in t...
Exploring Hong Kong Films of the 1930s and 1940s Part 1: Era and Film History, 2022
Chen, Timmy Chih-Ting. “The Disunity of Body and Soul: Border-Crossing Anxieties in the First Post-War Hong Kong Song-and-Dance Film Portrait of Four Beauties.” In Exploring Hong Kong Films of the 1930s and 1940s Part 1: Era and Film History, edited by Kwok Ching-ling and May Ng, 210-23. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2022. Produced by Great China Film Development Co., Ltd. (aka Dazhonghua) and directed by Hu Xinling (1914–2000), Portrait of Four Beauties (1948), the first post-war Hong Kong Mandarin song-and-dance film, was conceived as a comeback film for Hu Xinling and the ‘Four Sisters of Shanghai Cinema’: Kung Chiu-hsia, Chen Qi, Zhang Fan and Chen Chuan-chuan. In Japanese-occupied Shanghai, the four actresses starred in the film produced by China United Film Company Limited (‘Zhonglian’ in short), Four Sisters (directed by Li Pingqian, 1942), became sworn sisters and opened a café where they sang. After the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945, Kung Chiu-hsia’s husband Hu Xinling was considered a ‘treasonable filmmaker’ because he had co-directed the controversial Sino-Japanese co-production, Remorse in Shanghai (aka Signal Fires of Shanghai, 1944), with Inagaki Hiroshi and Griffin Yue Feng. After their café went out of business, the ‘Four Sisters’ moved to Hong Kong to look for job opportunities. Why did Portrait of Four Beauties fail both at the box office and critically in both Shanghai and Hong Kong? In the knowledge production of film historiography, how do we situate films which are artistic and commercial failures and rediscover their significance? This essay does not intend to assert the artistic significance of Portrait of Four Beauties. Rather, it approaches the film through the lens of its border-crossing failure and discusses Hu Xinling as a misunderstood border-crossing director. I argue that Portrait of Four Beauties, as both an artistic and commercial failure, is best understood as director Hu Xinling’s subtle expression of southbound filmmakers’ border-crossing anxieties as they navigated between wartime Shanghai and post-war Hong Kong film industries through the dialectic of the real and the fake, the dilemma between artistic and romantic pursuits, and the disunity of body and soul in song-and-dance performances on the part of the female artists.