| Is the vernacular necessarily provincial and parochial? Can it be cosmopolitan? How does it relate to the national? What factors determine its 'nature'? How do vernacular cultural productions shed light on the making of a minor subject and a minor culture in an increasingly connected world dominated by a few major cultures? This dissertation focalizes on the above questions through the case of vernacular Chinese film culture, specifically through the use of Cantonese dialect and a vernacular art form -- Chinese opera in the cinema in Cantonese speaking Hong Kong and mainland Guangzhou. It is historical, studying Chinese film culture in the South from the advent of sound triggering the birth of Cantonese cinema in 1933 when the famed opera star Sik Kok-sin starred in a Cantonese sound costume drama The White Gold Dragon (Tang Xiaodan, 1933) to the mid 1980s. In the mid-1980s, operatic performances are often cited for cutting-edge statement or sentiment, for instance, in China-made Swan Song (Zhang Zeming, 1985), and the talk and discussion of vernacular cultural production re-surfaced in mainland China to assert a regional identity in the context of the hegemony of the official Mandarin language and 'Middle Kingdom' Chinese culture. Traversing Hong Kong and mainland Guangzhou, it studies Chinese film culture beyond geo-political delimitation under the permuting forces of nationalism, colonialism and other forces.;Existing scholarship on Cantonese cinema is sporadic, often concentrating on its supposedly 'low' quality and provincialism. In spite of occasional grudging admission of its vibrancy, contemporariness and critical engagement with social issues, traditional Sino-centric and Eurocentric film historiography marginalizes Cantonese cinema. But Cantonese cinema is as transnational as it is regional. Apart from a broad geographical coverage in terms of production and dissemination in British-ruled Hong Kong, socialist mainland Guangzhou and overseas Cantonese speaking communities, Cantonese cinema mobilizes Cantonese, Mainland Chinese, Cantonese immigrants from the USA and so on, to produce films to be consumed within and outside of the Cantonese speaking South China. Film companies mobilizing transnational capital and distribution, such as Daguan (Grandview) by Cantonese American Joseph Sunn Jue and the Cantonese film production unit of Shanghai-backed Shaw Brothers and Singapore-supported Cathay are instances of Cantonese cultural production spilling over regional borders. Major Cantonese film production companies, such as Union and Kwong Ngee, were established in 1952 and 1955 respectively to target specifically at Cantonese speaking demographic at home and abroad. Aesthetically, the prominence of intertextual practices -- imitation, parody, hybridity, and the appropriation of practices or expressions ranging from Chinese to Hollywood and European in films as far different as musicals, opera films or martial arts films- bespeaks openness and an attitude far transcending the provincial. In output, as a film industry, or in terms of transnational popularity and consumption, Cantonese cinema has the semblance of a national cinema. The case of Cantonese cinema indicates that the margin and the center, the provincial and the national can only be dichotomized on the basis of the rights of articulation and discursive power in accordance with the epistemology of major cultures. Instead of subscribing to a linear relation between the binary sets, this project argues for a 'border thinking' approach to Cantonese cinema and culture. Rather than working within the epistemological perspective of major cultures, this project contests the dominant regime of knowledge production facilitating marginalization in the first place. It thus thinks from the position of a minor culture and traces its navigation between subalternized knowledge and hegemonic forces of subjectivization in Cantonese speaking regions or communities that are being increasingly eroded by forces of national reintegration and/or globalization since the late 1970s.;1Two types of spelling system have been adopted in this chapter. I have used the Cantonese spelling system for names and organizations from Hong Kong where they have been used as such. In designated cases, the English names of personalities, Fruit Chan, Bruce Lee, John Woo, have been kept since they have been recognized as such. The system of Chinese Pinyin has been used for other names, titles or associations. As to the translation of primary Chinese sources into English, unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine. |
