Fruit Chan Film Tragic Exploration

Fruit Chan is a Hong Kong director who has become famous since the late 1990s. He paved his way of art with the directors in the movement "New Wave of Hong Kong Film" (the late 1970s - the middle 1980s). His films have the realistic traits of the films in this movement. Starting with the Three Works of Returning, Fruit Chan has filmed seven films showing the living reality of the people who live in the bottom of the society. In Hong Kong, there are many films which have the magnificent image and the complicated narration, such as comedy, Kung-fu film, and affectional film. The films reflecting history and society especially the tragic feeling are hardly seen in the screen. With the completed esthetic characteristic of realism and the deep human content, the only seven films can be regarded as the classical ones of the films of realism of Hong Kong.This thesis, based on the broad meaning of tragedy, with the theory of film esthetics and film narration, analyses the tragic characteristics of Fruit Chan's films and how these films combine the esthetic rules of realism with the tragic characteristics. In the first chapter, I research the tragic narration of Fruit Chan's films in terms of the theme and the plots. In the second chapter, I analyses the type, the characteristics and the origin of the tragic roles in Fruit Chan's films. The third chapter gives a concrete analysis of the tragic image, and the significance of Fruit Chan's tragic films is presented in the fourth chapter. Through the research, we can know the esthetic principle of Fruit Chan's films and the influence of these films in the history of Hong Kong film.