Postscript

Peking Opera Blues presents a jiegu fengjin metafiction to the 1980s Hong Kong of the film’s making and release. This is done by Tsui Hark evoking a past (Republican China), that draws on historical hindsights for allegorizing lessons of history with respect to colonial Hong Kong’s post-1997 future under the “one country, two systems” provision. While Peking Opera Blues does not have an explicit agenda for exerting pressure on the powers that be and for swaying public opinion in favor of democracy as an alternative to political China’s authoritarianism, it is nevertheless a commentary on the long, unsuccessful, march to Chinese democracy and its impact on contemporary society, most especially Hong Kong. Tsui Hark achieves this by particular forms of editing and mise en scène, and also by referencing Chinese cultural forms such as Peking opera, mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, the “three-women” films, and Canto-pop and Mandarin songs.

Warlords, History, and the Democratic Dream

This chapter explores the film’s historical situatedness in terms of specific events in China: the Wuhan uprising (1911), the Xinhai Revolution, the development of the Chinese Republic (1912), the Revolutionary Alliance’s Kuomintang, the elections of 1913, the Republican dream of electoral democracy and warlordism. Leaders, like Yuan Shikai and in particular Sun Yat-sen, alongside fictionalized entities such as the two warlords, General Tsao (Cao) and General Tun (Duan), and the revolutionary fervor, democratic reforms and dreams, monarchist revivalism and revolutions which variously went along with them, are central to reading the film’s fiction-historical continuum (set in Peiping 1913) and for rethinking and reimagining the Chinese democratic dream of the Republican period. The result is that Peking Opera Blues generally demonstrates that any envisioned Chinese democracy was, then, and most especially now for contemporary Hong Kong, still elusive.

Setting the Scene

The Introduction contextualizes Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues both in the light of the many struggles for democracy in modern China since Republican times, and in the light of his own filmmaking career. It suggests that politically committed youth, and so-called revolutionaries, seeking social transformations in the post-imperial China depicted in this film, may well have parallels in contemporary Hong Kong especially post 1997. In addition to highlighting Tsui’s specific, and well-received, contributions in cinema, some social, political and cultural contexts, particularly related to questions of Chinese identity, culturation, citizenship and colonialism, together with some of the issues specific to contemporary Hong Kong and Sinophonic filmmaking, are raised in order to prepare the ground for situating five different acts of reading film (through multiple theoretical and analytical lenses) in the chapters to follow.

The Shadowplay of Attractions and Painted Faces

The two Blues films manifest a strong postmodern tendency by establishing an intertextual relationship between the “present” of the film and the “past” embodied, for example, in the cultural phenomenon of Peking Opera, which heavily informs Peking Opera Blues. As such, both films, with their blending of the cinematic, the theatrical and the dramatic conjuring up amazing spectacles that emphasize visuality, performance and movement, may both be read as a postmodern shadowplay of attractions (dianguang yingxi) which has the characteristics of an on-screen vaudeville show. This dianying (electric shadowplay) has parodic invocations that, through strategies of disruption and postmodern bricolage often involve a playful mixing of history, fiction, time, place, and language. This creates postmodern pastiches, most especially with ways of reading history, by incorporating the filmic and the operatic and thereby creating meta-cinematic structures where the resultant aural and visual excessiveness calls into question illusions of fixed systems of representation.

Three-Women Fiction, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

At work in Peking Opera Blues is a deeply intertextual relation to the film adaptations (three-women films) of a popular form of sentimental romance fiction - mandarin duck and butterfly fiction (yuanyang hudie) - which emerged when China, after thousands of years of dynastic rule, first experimented with democracy as an alternative mode of governance and lifestyle. This “fiction of comfort” came under attack by the May Fourth Movement after 1919, and was eventually consigned to the margins of modern Chinese literature. Reading through the lens of “three-women” films like Fate in Tears and Laughters (1932), Three Modern Girls (1933), Sun Moon Star (1960), and The Story of Three Loves (1963), and their women-centered narratives, enables a reading of Peking Opera Blues which reveals some of the ways in which Tsui Hark is able to emphasize the idea of women as narrative images; to highlight female agencies and subjectivities and to explore the rising status of women in the more globally connected, post-Confucian, and post patriarchal consumerist society of Hong Kong.

Shanghai and Peking Blues: Fiction as Imagined History

Peking Opera Blues is a mixed-genre film built out of intertextual allusions to other film genres and texts. This enriches the film’s addressivity and is achieved particularly by functioning as a companion piece to Tsui’s 1984 film Shanghai Blues. Both films share narrative devices that mesh historicity and fictionality, creating narratives framed by history imagined into fiction and fiction imagined as history. This may be theorized as a jiegu fengjin mode of social and political criticism (using the past to comment on or lampoon the present). This jiegu fengjin mode of narration in the two Blues films, especially in the context of relating the films’ political relevance to 1980s Hong Kong, is that it yokes together, in metafictional ways, a spatio-temporal imaginary that sutures the past (turbulent times in China) to the present (political uncertainties in contemporary Hong Kong), while simultaneously seeking to engage the future (Hong Kong’s futurity as a special administrative region under Chinese sovereignty after 1997).

Story and Structure

This chapter analyses Peking Opera Blues through the lens of formalism and its structuralist narratology which produce cinematic codes that give the film its form, including Tsui’s auterist signatures such as cluttered mise-en-scène and rapid editing style. It focuses on the film’s story, style, structure, tone, and imagery, deploying the methodologies of singular shot, shot-by-shot, and mise-en-scène analyses with respect to compositional and editing matter. Accordingly it develops analytical templates for close readings of film structure and narrative. This yields a descriptive detailing of film form, drawing attention to specific cinematic effects and affects by outlining in tabular form the“grammar” of filmmaking and consequently highlighting the formal logic of shot compositions and shot assemblages, the integration of imagery and sound, and various narrative and performative elements.