Centre Stage: Reconstructing the Bio-Pic
1997; Issue: 42 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics
ResumoAS HONG KONG PREPARES TO BECOME A SPECIAL Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, the city's filmmakers struggle to define and preserve its cultural identity. In the run-up to 1997, this historical project has tended to focus around two areas of concern, namely the search to establish forms of localized subjectivity and the desire to explore issues of space and mobility. Ackbar Abbas, who has written of the best general accounts of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, (1) claims that such concerns are exemplified most outstandingly (68) in Stanley Kwan's Rouge (1987) and Centre Stage (a.k.a. Ruan Lingyu, or Actress, 1991). As well as offering unique conceptualizations of space and subjectivity, these two titles have done much to secure Kwan's reputation as of the true auteurs of Hong Kong cinema. Both Rouge, which has already been the subject of an impressive amount of English-language criticism, (2) and Centre Stage present their meditations on such themes dialectically, through the utilization of a multiple diegesis, or what Abbas calls a double temporal framework (75). Rouge, a ghost melodrama, moves back and forth between an opulently recreated 1930s Hong Kong and a deliberately dank and lifeless 1980s, while the latter film utilizes multiple diegeses as it oscillates between 1990s Hong Kong and 1930s Shanghai. In each case, narrative complexities establish links between Hong Kong's past, present, and future. Centre Stage is ostensibly a bio-pic about the great Chinese film star Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935). However, it is formally and thematically so complex a Brechtian example of metacinema that it constitutes a radical reworking of both genre and subject matter. The film mixes beautifully shot period reconstructions of Ruan's life and work with contemporary interviews with the Hong Kong stars who act out the reconstructions. In turn, these diegetic layers are then edited together with actual footage of Ruan's surviving films and present-day interviews with her colleagues from the Shanghai film industry. The result, as in a cubist montage or Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), is a kaleidoscopic narrative articulation. No single piece of information is presented from any point of view, although the various accounts all come together to form a completely sympathetic testimonial. Resisting the temptation to recount incidents from Ruan's entire life, Centre Stage focuses on her public and private affairs in the years immediately leading up to her premature death. With the black-and-white footage of the Hong Kong production crew acting as a framing device, we see this lady from Shanghai negotiate various emotional and professional demands. Ruan Lingyu/Maggie Cheung rehearses and films with a number of directors, giving famous performances for Sun Yu (Wild Flower, 1930), Wu Yonggang (The Goddess, 1934), and Cai Chusheng (New Woman, 1934). However, just as the Japanese invasion of China disrupts her work at Lianhua Studios, Ruan experiences behind-the-scenes problems with her estranged husband, Tang Shi-chan/Lawrence Ng. And after the Shanghai press gets its teeth into her adulterous affair with Chang Ta-min/Ch'in Han, she becomes distanced from him as well. Subject to numerous torments and public humiliations, Ruan Lingyu commits suicide in 1935, proclaiming, in the note left lying by her side, that gossip is a fearful thing. According to Centre Stage, the tragedy of Ruan's life resonates on a number of different levels. In this article, I would like to suggest how the film's fundamental reconstruction of the bio-pic is perfectly in keeping with the search to establish localized forms of Hong Kong space and subjectivity. The utilization of multiple diegeses necessitates a reading of the connections between Hong Kong's colonial past and its post-colonial future. This is a strategy which is familiar from some of Kwan's earlier work. To give example, Ackbar Abbas points out that when Fleur/Anita Mui, the ghostly 1930s courtesan from Rouge, sets out to find her old flame in the historical present, her pale demeanor prompts character to describe her as for fifty years, thus ironically referring to the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong, which decrees that after 1997 the settlement shall remain unchanged for half a century under China's reconstructed policy of one country, two systems (75). …
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