Abstract
The global politics of the Cold War and its impact on the cinematic economy and cultural expressions of Chinese-language films in Hong Kong have been seriously understudied. It is largely because of insufficient attention paid to the geographical marginalities outside of Mainland China: Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia where the movie industries and film culture thrived on alternative Chinese cine-links. This chapter studies two translocal ghost narratives, Li Chenfeng’s A Beautiful Corpse Comes to Life (1956) and Li Hanxiang’s The Enchanting Shadow (1960), which reappropriated classical ghost stories adapted from Chinese vernacular literature and drama. The two striking filmic manifestations exemplify what I see as the global Cold War cultural manifestations during the 1950s and 60s. I read the ghost story renditions not only in their generic and aesthetic interests but also as contesting claims of Chineseness, in particular the ways in which the Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking films compete for the legitimacy of Chinese identities by mobilizing traditional literary sources and cultural symbols in colonial Hong Kong.
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Notes
- 1.
The paper has been achieved with the support of funding for my project, “Colonial Censorship and the Cultural Politics of Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War.” General Research Grant (641013), the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, 2014–16.
- 2.
For a discussion of Mandarin film development outside of the mainland in the Cold War period, see Poshek Fu “Introduction: The Shaw Brothers Diasporic Cinema” (2008), 1–26.
- 3.
See, for example, Lipschutz (2001).
- 4.
Kenny K.K. Ng, “Inhibition vs. Exhibition” (2008), 23–35.
- 5.
- 6.
Tam, ibid., 19.
- 7.
A study of postwar Chinese cinema and literature in Hong Kong, in fact, reveals that the ideological split between the leftwing and rightwing cultural camps was less acute than we expect. Their works were less political (in the sense of advocating or criticizing capitalism or communism) than they are generally assumed. They were either market-oriented or culturally critical centered on themes of individual freedom and social edification. For a pioneering study of postwar Hong Kong’s leftwing cinema, see Sek “Left-wing Cinema” (1983).
- 8.
Judith Zeitlin, The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-century Chinese Literature (2007), 4.
- 9.
David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-century China (2004), 264–65.
- 10.
For a study of the state’s political intention to curb superstition and fantasy in Republican Chinese cinema in Shanghai, see Zhiwei Xiao “Constructing a New National Culture” (1999), 183–99; On martial arts and fantasy film, see Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (2005), 199–243.
- 11.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1984).
- 12.
Stephen Teo, “The Liaozhai-Fantastic and the Cinema of the Cold War” (2006).
- 13.
- 14.
All the lyrics and dialogue cited from the film is translated by Stephen Teo (2006).
- 15.
Jeff Smith, Film Criticism, The Cold War, and the Blacklist (2014), 255.
- 16.
Songling Pu, “Nie Xiaoqian,” Strange Tales from Make-do Studio, trans. Denis C. and Victor H. Mair (1989), 101.
- 17.
Historically, from the 1930s to 1950s, concerned Cantonese filmmakers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou promoted major “cleaning-up” campaigns to try to lift up the standards of Cantonese cinema. For a historical study of Cantonese cinema, see The Hong Kong-Guangdong Film Connection, ed. Ain-ling Wong (2005).
- 18.
In the studio’s short-lived history of 15 years, Union produced only 44 films (against 1500–2000 Cantonese film titles in the 1950s alone) because the studio refused to partake in shoddy projects and lesser entertainments of superstition and feudal ideology prevalent in postwar Cantonese cinema. See One for All: The Union Film Spirit, ed. Grace Ng (2011).
- 19.
An English translation of the chilling Scene 35 (“Resurrection”) is in Xianzu Tang, The Peony Pavilion, trans. Cyril Birch (2002), 199–204.
- 20.
John Zou, “A Chinese Ghost Story: Ghostly Counsel and Innocent Man,” in Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry (2008), 59.
- 21.
Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (2009), 183. For an analysis of Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987), an urban ghost film as a nostalgic enchantment with Hong Kong’s colonial past, see especially 171–79.
- 22.
For an analysis of the horror genre in post-handover Hong Kong as revealing the city’s renegotiation with her Chinese identity, see Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Neda Hei-tung Ng “Magic, Medicine, Cannibalism” (2009), 145–59.
- 23.
For a discussion of Asian ghost literature and film in the paradigm of Asian gothic, see Andrew Hock Soon Ng “Introduction: The Gothic Visage in Asian Narratives” (2008), 1–15.
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Ng, K.K.K. (2017). Censorship at Work: Cold War Paranoia and Purgation of Chinese Ghost Stories. In: Chu, YW. (eds) Hong Kong Culture and Society in the New Millennium. The Humanities in Asia, vol 4. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3668-2_6
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