Stanley Kwan's Center Stage (The New Hong Kong Cinema Series)

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Center Stage METTE HIJORT

STANLEY KWAN'S

Center Stage

Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press's name in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further information see p. iv.

THE N E W HONG KONG CINEMA SERIES Series General Editors Ackbar Abbas Wimal Dissanayake Mette Hjort Gina Marchetti Stephen Teo Series Advisors Chris Berry Nick Browne Ann Hui Leo Lee Li Cheuk-to Patricia Mellencamp Meaghan Morris Paul Willemen Peter Wollen Wu Hung •

•

•

•

•

Other titles in the series Fruit Chan's Durian Wendy Gan John Woo's A Better Karen Fang

Durian Tomorrow

Tsui Hark's Zu: Warriors Andrew Schroeder

From the Magic

W o n g Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Wimal Dissanayake W o n g Kar-wai's Happy Jeremy Tambling

Together

Mountain

STANLEY KWAN'S

Center Stage

Mette Hjort

# m * * it |£ *fc H O N G KONG U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Hong Kong University Press 14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Praya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong © Hong Kong University Press 2006 ISBN-13: 978-962-209-791-9 ISBN-10: 962-209-791-X All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Secure on-line Ordering http://www.hkupress.org Printed and bound by Condor Production Ltd., Hong Kong, China.

Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose art explores the complex themes of language across cultures, has written the Press's name in his Square Word Calligraphy. This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and the distinctive nature of our English-language books published in China. "At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot. Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed." — Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing

To Wong Ting Ting

Contents

Series Preface Acknowledgements /

ix xiii

On Method, Production, and Reception

l

Angles and Approaches

5

Documentary Filmmaking in Hong Kong

10

The Making of Center Stage

16

Producers' Decisions, Distributors' Practices

20

The Constitution of Center Stage as a Classic of the New Hong Kong Cinema

24

viii

2

3

CONTENTS

Film Style

35

The Cinematic Image as Historical Trace, Documentary Record, and Interpretive Reconstruction

37

The Director's Cut and the Shortened Version

49

Artifice, Reflexivity, and Doubt: Center Stage and the Question of Knowledge

58

Relevance and Meaning

89

Heritage Culture

91

Against Gossip: On Hierarchy and Egalitarianism

100

Lianhua, Kwan, and TVB

113

Notes

117

Credits

121

Awards and Nominations

125

Stanley Kwan's Filmography

127

Bibliography

129

Index

137

Series Preface

The New Hong Kong cinema came into existence under very special circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting in a change of cultural paradigms. Such critical moments have produced the cinematic achievements of the early Soviet cinema, neorealism, the "nouvelle vague," the German cinema in the 1970s and, we can now say, the recent Hong Kong cinema. If this cinema grew increasingly intriguing in the 1980s, after the announcement of Hong Kong's return to China, it was largely because it had to confront a new cultural and political space that was both complex and hard to define, where the problems of colonialism were overlaid with those of globalism in an uncanny way. Such uncanniness could not be caught through straight documentary or conventional history writing; it was left to the cinema to define it. It does so by presenting to us an urban space that slips away if we try to grasp it too directly, a space that cinema coaxes into existence by whatever means at its disposal. Thus it is by eschewing a narrow idea of relevance and pursuing disreputable genres like

SERIES PREFACE

melodrama, kung fu and the fantastic that cinema brings into view something else about the city which could otherwise be missed. One classic example is Stanley Kwan's Rouge, which draws on the unrealistic form of the ghost story to evoke something of the uncanniness of Hong Kong's urban space. It takes a ghost to catch a ghost. In the new Hong Kong cinema, then, it is neither the subject matter nor a particular set of generic conventions that is paramount. In fact, many Hong Kong films begin by following generic conventions but proceed to transform them. Such transformation of genre is also the transformation of a sense of place where all the rules have quietly and deceptively changed. It is this shifting sense of place, often expressed negatively and indirectly — but in the best work always rendered precisely in (necessarily) innovative images — that is decisive for the New Hong Kong Cinema. Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema come to an end? However we answer the question, there is a need now to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong cinema. During the last few years, a number of full-length books have appeared, testifying to the topicality of the subject. These books survey the field with varying degrees of success, but there is yet an almost complete lack of authoritative texts focusing in depth on individual Hong Kong films. This book series on the New Hong Kong Cinema is designed to fill this lack. Each volume will be written by a scholar/ critic who will analyse each chosen film in detail and provide a critical apparatus for further discussion including filmography and bibliography. Our objective is to produce a set of interactional and provocative readings that would make a self-aware intervention into modern Hong Kong culture. We advocate no one theoretical position; the authors will approach their chosen films from their own distinct points of vantage and interest. The aim of the series is to generate open-ended discussions of the selected films, employing

SERIES PREFACE

xl

diverse analytical strategies, in order to urge the readers towards self-reflective engagements with the films in particular and the Hong Kong cultural space in general. It is our hope that this series will contribute to the sharpening of Hong Kong culture's conceptions of itself. In keeping with our conviction that film is not a self-enclosed signification system but an important cultural practice among similar others, we wish to explore how films both reflect and inflect culture. And it is useful to keep in mind that reflection of reality and reality of reflection are equally important in the understanding of cinema. Ackbar Abbas Wimal Dissanayake

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt to all those who have taught me about Hong Kong film during my four years in Hong Kong. I am particularly grateful to the filmmaker, distributor, and producer Shu Kei for enthusiastically supporting my project and for being willing to answer my many questions. Special thanks are also due to David Bordwell for being the mentor, friend, and fellow traveler that he is. My thanks to Stanley Kwan and Peggy Chiao for having made time to talk to me, and to James Tsim for his efficient mediation. The staff at the Hong Kong Film Archive went to great lengths to help me. I am deeply grateful to Lingnan University, and especially to the Kwan Fong Center for Cultural Research and Development (directed by Meaghan Morris) and to the Cultural Studies Department (chaired by Markus Reisenleitner) for having provided me with a stimulating and collegial intellectual home in 2004-05. Stephen Chan provided considerable inspiration between Tuen Mun and Hong Kong Island. Li Siu-leung tracked down information on the Ruan Lingyu series. Jonathan Chan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

graciously helped with images and translations at an early stage in my research. And Esther Cheung at the University of Hong Kong shared bibliographies. Many thanks to Ackbar Abbas and Wimal Dissanayake for the precious opportunity to write on Center Stage. Insightful comments by an anonymous reader for the Hong Kong University Press helped to improve the manuscript. Publishing this book has been a pleasure from start to finish, thanks to Colin Day and Phoebe Chan. More than anything else I have ever written, this book was made possible by the love and support of friends and family. It is dedicated to Wong Ting Ting, caring professional par excellence.

On Method, Production, and Reception

Center Stage (a.k.a. Actress, Ruan Lingyu and Yuen Ling-yuk), the fifth of Stanley Kwan's feature films, was released in Hong Kong on February 20, 1992. As the film's various titles jointly suggest, this work references the early Chinese film star, Ruan Lingyu (Yuen Ling-yuk), who committed suicide on International Women's Day in 1935, at the young age of 25 and at the height of her career. During her short life Ruan Lingyu made 29 films, playing roles as 'peasant, worker, social butterfly, beggar, student, teacher, nun' and prostitute in films directed by many of the directors associated with the golden age of Chinese cinema (Meyer 2005: 2). Kwan's film begins in 1929, the year in which Ruan Lingyu started working for the newly established Lianhua studio in Shanghai, and concludes with her suicide in 1935. While Ruan Lingyu was the object of pernicious gossip during her short life, and the occasion for all kinds of mythmaking after her death, some of the narrative elements have become part of a settled consensus view, thereby qualifying as factually correct.

STANLEY KWAN'S CENTER STAGE

Ruan Lingyu's family was originally from Guangdong, but had settled in Shanghai, where her father found modestly paying work with a foreign company. When Ruan Lingyu's father died some six years after her birth, her mother sought employment as a maid with the wealthy Zhang family, also originally from Guangdong. The youngest son, Zhang Damin, became Ruan Lingyu's common law husband in due course. When the couple separated some years later, it was Ruan Lingyu who supported the gambling womanizer Zhang Damin through alimony payments derived from her acting contract with Lianhua. While Zhang's motives are a matter of some speculation, he is known in 1935 to have filed a legal suit against Ruan Lingyu and Tang Jishan, a wealthy, married tea merchant with whom she was living. The charges leveled against Ruan Lingyu and Tang Jishan were adultery, theft, and falsification of documents. The legal battle initiated by Zhang coincided with the release of Cai Chusheng's New Woman {XinNuxing, 1934), in which Ruan Lingyu played the role of Ai Xia, an actress who had actually committed suicide in 1934 as a result of rumours about her person circulated by the popular press. Scandalized no doubt by the critical depiction of the press as a mere rumour machine, journalists found a ready scapegoat in Cai Chusheng's lead actress, whose personal life they proceeded to expose in lurid and distorted detail. The kind of strategic and exploitative maneuvering that caused Ruan Lingyu to take her own life continued after her death, with Tang Jishan releasing two suicide notes, the one addressed 'To Society', the other to himself, both of which were subsequently shown to be forgeries. Ruan Lingyu, it turned out, had in fact written notes to both Tang Jishan and Zhang Damin in which she linked her suicide to physical abuse at the hands of the former and psychological abuse inflicted by the latter (Meyer 2005: xvi, 61-66). One of the phrases from the false note addressed 'To Society' — 'gossip is a fearful thing' — has, however, come over the years somehow to summarize the

ON METHOD, PRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION

3

complex causes leading to Ruan Lingyu's death, a result no doubt of Chinese modernist writer Lu Xun's critical essay, which uses the line as its title and as part of a serious condemnation of the popular press and its scandal-minded readers. Noted around the world for its spectacular nature, Ruan Lingyu's funeral procession drew over 100,000 mourners. This massive mobilization clearly suggests the extent to which Ruan Lingyu had touched Chinese audiences through her many evocations of the sufferings of women in China, but it no doubt also points to the variability of public opinion and to guilt-ridden realizations of the tragic consequences of actually generating or passively condoning malicious talk. Although Kwan's film explores the legend that is Ruan Lingyu, it defies easy generic classification as a biopic or as one of a number of different kinds of documentary filmmaking. The film's reflexive, documentary dimension marks its departure from the generic regularities of typical biopics, while its invitation to engage in a certain amount of make-believe complicates its relation to some of the more standard approaches to non-fiction film. The film's referent, we shall see, is more inclusive than some of its titles suggest, for the point is not simply to explore the legendary life and works of Ruan Lingyu, but also to display the persona and abilities of the actress who stands in for the Cantonese-speaking Shanghai actress in reconstructions pertaining to her life and to scenes from several of her lost films. Footage documenting Kwan and his crew as they research and shoot their film, or as they reflect on the cinematic process in which they are engaged, further expands the referential scope of the film, making it a reflection on the nature of film itself, and, more important, on one possible model for filmmaking and its implications within a Hong Kong and larger Chinese context. While 'biopic' and 'documentary' are classificatory terms that immediately come to mind in connection with Center Stage, it is clear that the film also warrants consideration as a heritage or nostalgia film, or in terms of the genres that largely


define Kwan's career up until the making of the highly personal film essay, Yang + Yin: Gender in the Chinese Cinema {Nan Sheng NuXiang, 1996): melodrama and women's film.1 That Center Stage should occupy a privileged site within the New Hong Kong film canon is not surprising, for the film brings into play many of the elements that define the very concept of a New Hong Kong cinema: a signficant work by a director with a distinctive style or voice who is able to move audiences (be they local, transnational, or global) through reflections (whether direct or indirect) on Hong Kong culture and identity in the period following the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration dictating Hong Kong's reversion to China in 1997, a timeframe that coincides with the intensification of various globalizing processes. While neorealism, the nouvelle vague and the New German Cinema all relied on the idea of a radical break with the past, it is the New Hong Kong cinema that has the most intimate relation to the rupturous and potentially creative dynamics of socially significant time, what the Greek-born French philosopher, Cornelius Castoriadis (1998), calls kairotic time. Unlike chronological time, which measures the passing of equally insignificant moments, kairotic time transcends the banalities of interchangeable units and introduces a properly existential dimension. If chronological time is the temporality of petty bureaucrats, kairotic time is the temporality of festival and revolution, of creativity and change. By virtue of the chronologies of its conception (early 1989), production (1990-91), and release (1991/92), Center Stage, much more so than many of the other titles associated with the New Hong Kong cinema, is deeply imbricated with the kairotic temporality of postcolonial Hong Kong. Center Stage is produced and released at a time when Hong Kongers were given traumatic occasion (as a result of the Tiananmen massacre on June Fourth, 1989) to engage, yet again, with the implications of the handover. As we shall see, the film's formal features (and arguably generic characteristics) are


5

themselves affected by the events in question. Center Stage is, then, quite literally marked by the kind of socially significant temporality that underwrites the idea of an ever-expanding corpus of films capable of articulating the being and becoming of Hong Kong as it envisages, or actually grapples with, various postcolonial possibilities and realities.

Angles and Approaches Even the most cursory survey of the history of film scholarship reveals a plethora of methodological choices, encompassing (among many others) the stylistic analysis of early film historians, the more theory-driven Marxist psycho-semiology of the 1970s and 80s, the more recent cognitive turn, and the largely concurrent emphasis on culture, broadly speaking, that characterizes a cultural studies approach to film. Some of these positions on film and its appropriate study insist on the importance of context, on the need, for example, to understand the history of a given film's production, distribution, and reception, whereas others foreground the autonomy of cinematic works, in some cases even from authorial intention, encouraging attention to intrinsic (acontextual) formal properties and, in some mobilizations of the autonomy thesis, to the ideological effects that can be derived, at a theoretical rather than empirical level, from these properties. While most film scholars, myself included, tend to work if not entirely within, then at least in ongoing conversation with, one of the major paradigms on offer, the question does arise as to how best to approach the particular task at hand, which is to shed light on Center Stage as an instance of the New Hong Kong cinema. Let me briefly outline some of the duties, challenges, and temptations as I see them.

6


Practitioner's

agency

One of the privileges of writing about contemporary Hong Kong cinema is that the people who make the films are available for discussions about their works, as is indeed characteristically the case with small-nation cinemas. Hong Kong qualifies as a small nation on two counts: it qualifies for small nation status by virtue of its history of foreign rule, and on account of its limited territory and population size (Hjort 2005). The handover, interestingly, marks the beginning of a process of transformation that will likely result in large nation status. In a small-nation context it is possible to ask directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, producers, and any number of other film professionals about the specific intentions that informed their contributions to a given work, about the problems they encountered in the course of executing those intentions, and about their overall assessment of the final work. In small-nation contexts, in short, the details of what I want to call practitioner's agency can be accessed to a significant degree. The temptation that arises as a result is to assume that it is somehow the duty of the film scholar faithfully to describe the aims, conflicts, problems, and solutions associated with a film's production, as they are more or less accurately remembered, and more or less accurately recounted, by its makers. Indeed, inasmuch as the very possibility of accessing practitioner's agency hinges on a dialogic or properly communicative stance, on a manifest orientation toward mutual understanding, any critical scrutinizing of stated intentions in what Paul Ricoeur (1970) famously referred to as a hermeneutics of suspicion easily becomes a form of betrayal, one that quickly forecloses future dialogue between critic and practitioner about the small-nation cinema in question. Yet, a critical discussion must do more than simply rehearse the views of practitioners, and not only because the narrative that emerges from various exchanges may fail to produce a coherent picture. The challenge, then, is to


7

interpret and analyze aspects of practitioner's agency, but to do so in a way that does not betray the trust upon which interviews and friendly conversations are based.

Film form Unlike monographs or articles, a film classics series presents a welcome opportunity to explore every aspect of the chosen work. There is room, for example, for careful dissections of the film into sequences and scenes with an eye to understanding the relation between story and plot and the nature of the film's narration. And within this more general dissection, a more detailed analysis of the film in terms of shots (their type, angle, and duration), sound-image relations, mise-en-scene, and art design can be readily accommodated. While any film deserving classification as a classic or canonical text is likely to be characterized by a formal complexity that merits description, Center Stage displays a level of intricacy that even critics committed to formal or stylistic analysis have been unable to detail in shorter pieces. The pars pro toto strategy adopted by Julian Stringer in his generally helpful' Center Stage. Reconstructing the Bio-Pic', is thus in many ways characteristic of the literature on Kwan's film: Center Stage as a whole is extremely difficult to segment — its mix of baffling scene transitions, flashforwards, and nonsimultaneous voice-overs would make even Christian Metz spit in impotent rage — but one relatively autonomous segment that I would like to concentrate on is based around the filming of New Woman at Lianhua Studios. (1997: 35) The result of the pars pro toto strategy, unavoidably so, is that the workings and dynamics of Center Stage as a semiotic system generated by formal elements and their motivated combination has yet to be analyzed in depth. The case for extensive formal analysis

8


of Center Stage is further strengthened by the existence — sometimes entirely overlooked by critics, other times merely noted in passing — of an original director's cut and shortened version of the work that differ in many important respects. Like most approaches to film, formal analysis is caught up with its own temptations, tending as it does towards a fetishism of form, the idea of form as an end in-and-of-itself becoming all the more convincing somehow as the mind focuses intensely on various intrinsic properties. The challenge, then, is to ensure that the compelling need for formal analysis of Center Stage does not efface questions having to do with what the formal system ultimately amounts to in cultural, political, or existential terms.

Relevance: theoretical

and pre-theoretical

conceptions

To do justice to a film classic is also to speak to its deeper meanings, understood as cultural significance, to provide some sense of why the work actually does or should matter. It is to provide answers to the question of relevance that linguists (Sperber and Wilson 1986), following the example of Paul Grice (1991), have singled out as central to communicative processes. Many film scholars, particularly those committed to self-understandings involving resistance to dominant and largely unjust arrangements, are strongly attuned to the importance of relevance, although sometimes at the expense of careful attention to the work's intrinsic features. An interest in cultural analysis often finds expression in terms of a consistent gravitation towards certain recurring problems and social dynamics. And the temptation, in some cases, is for the critic to discover the work's deeper significance in that very cluster of concepts, theories, and interpretations that make up her general framework for understanding cultural matters at a given moment in time. Yet, the film classic disappears from view in the very moment when such general theories are simply imposed on the


9

work, making it mean or matter in ways that focus only on elements happily coincident with a favoured interpretive stance. At the same time, it is worth pointing out that we are drawn to works, as critics and film scholars, because we see them as using a 'subtler language' (Taylor 1989) to explore the very issues with which we are theoretically, but also pre-theoretically, engaged. The decision to focus on one work rather than another is by no means an arbitrary one, but one connected in many instances to an ongoing project of exploration fueled by a number of driving concerns. If I am motivated to write at such length about Center Stage it is because I see this film as a cogent and deeply incisive exploration of norms, virtues, ideals, and pathologies that have long been of compelling interest to me. Caught up as it is with a life eclipsed by gossip, Center Stage is, in my mind, centrally about communication and scapegoating, about distorted and less distorted models of communication and the role that film (and especially the film milieu qua social system) can play in somewhat displacing various social ties constituted by pernicious forms of violence beyond legal sanction in favour of human connections forged through sympathy, charity, mutuality, and generosity. When it comes to the question of meaning, the challenge is to show, through a combination of careful formal, intentional, and historical analysis, that these phenomena do not emerge in a process of mere projection, but genuinely constitute the film's field of concern and significance. Center Stage and

discourse

To write about Center Stage, more than a decade after its release, is to enter into a rich and still ongoing conversation about the contributions, cinematic and other, that this now classic film makes. Inasmuch as the point must surely be to understand the film's emergence as a central text, and not merely to present a personal account of why it merits classification as an admirable example of


the New Hong Kong cinema, the idea of a work having what is known in the hermeneutic tradition as an 'effective history' (Gadamer 1989) deserves serious attention. Films that manage to animate communities, be they local, national, regional, transnational, or global, necessarily generate a certain amount of talk across a wide range of genres. Film juries provide discursive justification, be it formally or informally, for the allocation of prizes and awards. Journalists interview stars and directors, allowing for the discursive construction of a personal legend. And film scholars collectively contribute to an interpretive and theoretical discourse about these films, a discourse involving claims and counter-claims, but also, quite simply, a further nuancing of views. The concept of effective history invites us to see this multi-genred talk as integral somehow to these works and their meanings, rather than as a detachable or more or less insignificant second-order discourse. More realistically, perhaps, it encourages a commitment to charting the discursively mediated reception of works and to reconstructing, as fairly and charitably as possible, the various views and arguments that constitute works as classics and thereby ensure their continued circulation among us. I have outlined some basic methodological principles involving contextualizing and other impulses. The aim in what follows will not be to take up the identified tasks separately and in the order discussed, but to allow the various approaches to work together as required to suggest points of emphasis, lines of reasoning, and modes of justification in an unfolding argument designed to spell out how a given film has come to us, how it works, and why it ultimately matters.

Documentary Filmmaking in Hong Kong Up until Center Stage Kwan had consistently gravitated toward fiction film-making and the generic regularities of women's film


11

and melodrama. In its creative use of documentary materials and innovative referencing of actual historical figures, Center Stage thus marked a new direction for Kwan even if the tragic figure of Ruan Lingyu made clear continuities with the earlier works and their central concerns almost inevitable. Center Stage introduces something new and different into a cinematic oeuvre defined until that moment by a high degree of internal consistency, and to some extent the same can be said about the film's contribution to the larger context of Hong Kong filmmaking. Let us, then, briefly consider the place of documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong, not only in 1990 when Kwan first started developing his film about Ruan Lingyu, but also more recently. Whereas documentary filmmaking has a long and venerable history in countries such as France, Britain, Canada, and Denmark, Center Stage and its mobilization of documentary elements stood out as a striking exception to Hong Kong cinematic norms when it premiered in 1992. Documentary filmmaking continues to play a marginal role in Hong Kong, although the situation has changed somewhat in the intervening years. Videopower, a collective founded some ten years ago, has, for example, produced a steady stream of documentaries about local social issues with the help of a series of grants provided by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Unlike Center Stage, however, the productions associated with Videopower target, not the art film circuit, but various networks engaged in political activism. Ying E Chi, a non-profit organization created in 1997 and also funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, has done much to promote independent filmmaking in Hong Kong. Supporting visual styles and types of films at odds with mainstream commercial tendencies, Ying E Chi has helped to provide support for initiatives involving realism and nonfiction filmmaking. Ying E Chi's commitment to realism, among other things, is clearly articulated by founding member Vincent Chui in various discussions of his Dogma-inspired Leaving in

12


Sorrow (1999). Dogma 95 is a manifesto-based film movement initiated by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, in collaboration with his younger colleague, Thomas Vinterberg. The stripped down approach to filmmaking that the Dogma rules and manifesto encourage is cited by Chui as facilitating an exploration, involving both realism and documentary tendencies, of key moments in Hong Kong history, most notably Tiananmen and the handover. A more recent initiative launched by Tammy Cheung, awardwinning director of Secondary School (2002), promises to make documentary filmmaking a more significant feature of the Hong Kong film landscape. In 2004, Cheung founded a non-profit organization called 'Visible Record Limited', once again, with the help of a grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. A letter sent to potential donors as part of a Fundraising Campaign in the fall of 2004 describes the objectives of Visible Record Limited as follows: 'firstly, to promote documentary films and raise the level of appreciation; and secondly, to provide training for potential documentary filmmakers. Our jobs include: presenting filmmaking courses, organizing screenings and talks, organizing an annual documentary film festival; and distributing films from around the world.' While the Hong Kong Arts Development Council's support for Videopower, Ying E Chi, and now Visible Record Limited clearly reflects an awareness of the many important roles that documentary filmmaking can play in a given community, the actual creation of these various collectives testifies indirectly to the striking marginality of documentary film production in Hong Kong when Kwan first embarked on Center Stage. In 'China and Hong Kong Movies in Retrospect', Kwan draws a number of telling comparisons between Shanghainese film in the 1930s and 40s and Hong Kong filmmaking during the new wave period of the late 1970s and early 80s. In Kwan's short narrative a number of Hong Kong directors and titles become the vehicle for what he calls a 'new creative spirit' reminiscent of the golden age


13

of Chinese filmmaking: 'This new creative spirit prevailed for a time in the late 70s and early 80s, in films like Father and Son and Ah Ying by Allen Fong, The Story of Woo Viet and Boat People by Ann Hui, and Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind and Zu by Hark Tsui.'2 In the present context, the reference to Allen Fong, and especially to Father and Son, is particularly suggestive. Fong has long been an idiosyncratic figure in Hong Kong film milieus on account of his insistence on a realist style at odds with the kinetic pace and generic features of mainstream productions. Father and Son {Fuzi Qing), winner of the first annual Hong Kong Film Awards 'Best Picture', was released in 1981 and is a now classic semiautobiographical exploration of a boy's childhood years, especially his conflicts with his father. Kwan's deep respect for Allen Fong's work also finds clear expression in Yang + Yin: Gender in the Chinese Cinema, where the director is interviewed in the section devoted to father-son relationships and reflects on gender-related dynamics in a typical Hakka family. Ann Hui, evoked by Kwan in connection with The Story of Woo Viet and Boat People has, of course, long been associated with a unique ability to make room within the parameters of mainstream dramatic genres for the exploration of current problems and conflicts that more than warrant documentary treatment. 3 Sunless Days (1990), a documentary by the filmmaker, producer, distributor, and critic Shu Kei deserves more detailed discussion as possibly the first Hong Kong example of documentary filmmaking in an art house style. The film, which was shown at the Hong Kong film festival and went on to win the Ecumenical Prize at the Berlin film festival, began circulating just as Kwan was beginning to think seriously about making a complicated relation among fiction, nonfiction, and metacinema a structuring feature of Center Stage. Sunless Days was to have been part of a documentary TV series on Asian cities for NHK in Japan, the original plan having been to focus on the rock singer Hou Dejian.


Shu Kei's stated interest in focusing on this Taiwanese star in connection with the idea of Asian cities had a great deal to do with the highly atypical direction of the singer's personal trajectory, which began in Taipei and seems to have ended in Beijing, with Hong Kong as the transitional moment. Hou Dejian played a galvanizing role among the student activists in Beijing in the days, and indeed hours, preceding the massacre. Known to have been living with some of the students, he is also believed to have led them to Tiananmen Square with the intent to engage the authorities through negotiation. Hou Dejian's disappearance after the massacre, coupled with the trauma of the massacre itself, had the effect of completely transforming Shu Kei's documentary project, which became a deeply personal exploration of the repercussions of Tiananmen. Inspired to some extent by Chris Marker's Sunless, Shu Kei's Sunless Days records the Hong Kong director's conversations with family and friends in Hong Kong, Australia, and Canada as they find ways of coping with Tiananmen. Although deeply personal, the film includes moments that are very much a matter of public awareness. One such moment concerns Hou Hsiao Hsien's award for A City of Sadness at the Venice film festival in 1990. The Taiwanese director's film about the brutal suppression in 1947 of a Taiwanese uprising targeting the corruption of Mainland officials becomes an unintended comment on Tiananmen in Sunless Days, as does the absence of the Taiwanese flag among the many other flags representing the nationality of films in competition. Sunless Days also includes a documentary made by twenty Hong Kong film professionals about the construction, by Hong Kong artists, of a replica of the Tiananmen Square Goddess of Democracy. The replica, Shu Kei tells us, was publicly displayed for three weeks in Hong Kong, before being assigned to a laboratory at Hong Kong University, where it is believed to have been destroyed. The documentary's fate is presented as equally telling. Although Shu Kei and his friends and colleagues offered the film,


15

at no cost, to 130 cinemas in Hong Kong, none of them, with the exception of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, agreed to show it. Shu Kei recalls Kwan as having seen Sunless Days at the Hong Kong Arts Centre and as having engaged him at some length about the film itself, as well as about the tasks, choices, and challenges involved in documentary filmmaking. The exchange points to the extent to which Center Stage was perceived by Kwan as a turning point within his filmmaking career, as a new direction involving a kind of expertise and understanding that was both different from that required by the fiction film and less readily available in Hong Kong filmmaking milieus. Kwan's ingenious insistence in Center Stage on the dynamics of belief and, more specifically, on the problems of distinguishing between unfounded and justified beliefs, was to make elements of documentary form salient in ways that were groundbreaking in Hong Kong by virtue of the absence of a vigorous documentary tradition, and certainly of documentary filmmaking in a reflexive or poetic vein. And these same elements would eventually define Center Stage as an innovative work within the largely transnational framework of the biopic's characteristic genre formulae. To point to striking absences that highlight the singularities of Center Stage is not, however, to suggest that the film emerged in a complete vacuum. Indeed, it is crucial to grasp the ways in which Kwan's film reflects his deep respect for local filmmakers such as Shu Kei, Allen Fong, and Ann Hui, all of whom have demonstrated an unswerving commitment to a form of critical or political practice, to the idea of personal voice rather than standardized expression, and to some notion of the real, be it in the form of a style or through the referential dimensions of fictions with a highly topical or clearly autobiographical dimension. Remarkable works are always at some level the result of an actual or merely internal dialogue with other works or filmmakers, and Kwan's Center Stage is no exception.

16


Kwan has gone on since Center Stage to direct a number of documentary films: Siqin Gaowa Special {Siqin Gaowa Er-dan Shi, 1993), Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (mentioned above), and Still Love You After All These {Man M Rushi, 1997). Siqin Gaowa focuses on the Cantonese opera singer by the same name and was produced for Taiwanese television by Peggy Chiao. As we shall see, this Taiwanese critic and producer played an important role in the conception of Center Stage. Still Love You After All These is Kwan's personal memoir of Hong Kong on the eve of the Handover. Kwan's 'Director's Statement' at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 1997 describes the thread that connects these different works: I made this documentary [Still Love You After All These] during the final months of British rule, and chose to look back at the Hong Kong I grew up in rather than forward to the future under China's sovereignty. In some ways, this film carries on what I began in my previous documentary Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema... these projects are rooted in my own memories from childhood: my experience of growing up in a poor family, my feelings towards my parents, my discovery of my own sexual orientation. The touchstone is my deep identification with the local tradition of Cantonese opera, and particularly with the opera Princess Chang Ping, in which the climactic line 'I deny, I deny, but in the end I can not deny' has resonances not only for me personally but also for all Hong Kong people.4

The Making of Center

Stage

Kwan's idea for a film about Ruan Lingyu was by no means without precedent. The mainland Chinese filmmaker Zhu Shi Lin had written a five-page treatment for such a film shortly after Ruan Lingyu's death, but never realized his project.5 In 1985, however,


17

Asia Television Limited (ATV), one of two terrestrial television stations in Hong Kong, broadcast a 20-episode series about Ruan Lingyu, with Hong Kong actress Cecilia Wong Hang-san in the role of the early silent film star.6 As Christopher Violet points out, the series was watched by record numbers of viewers in Hong Kong, was sold to the Mainland, and further distributed to the diasporic Chinese community via video clubs.7 While the series has been described by cinephiles with a detailed knowledge of Ruan Lingyu's films as superficial and therefore unilluminating, it did bring Ruan Lingyu to the attention of popular audiences and in some ways served as a point of contrast for Kwan as he was developing his own approach to the actress and star Ruan Lingyu. In an interview with Jean-Pierre Dionnet, the well-known presenter of Canal+'s Cinema de quartier, Kwan foregrounds two temporally coincident instances of fascination as the starting point for the Center Stagefilm. The experience of directing Rouge, Kwan claims, made the thought of working with Anita Mui on a subsequent project deeply compelling, while a retrospective of Ruan Lingyu's existing films (organized by the Hong Kong Arts Centre) helped to generate a creatively motivating appreciation for the early Chinese film actress's unique qualities and contributions. Rouge (1998), an innovative ghost story featuring Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung, established Kwan's reputation internationally and initiated the wave of 'nostalgia films' (Natalia Chan 2002: 255) that now features as one distinctive thread within the New Hong Kong cinema (see also Chow 2001). It is no secret that Kwan's original intention was to cast Anita Mui, rather than Maggie Cheung, in the role of Ruan Lingyu, and it is not uncommon for commentators to reflect on the wisdom of the original or actual choice and on the implications of the two quite different casting scenarios. One view has it that Anita Mui's physiognomy, body language, and even life history would have lent themselves more readily to the kind of cinematic project in which audiences are encouraged to make

18


believe that the contemporary actress somehow incarnates the earlier one, as in the more classic biopic. Cheung, the argument goes, somehow expresses an energetic, pragmatic, and essentially forward-looking Hong Kong sensibility, making her the antithesis of the kind of tragic figure that a film such as Center Stage would appear to require. Statements by Kwan about his initial intentions focus on precisely such putative similarities and their desirability within an original conception. That Maggie Cheung should have replaced Anita Mui is one of the many repercussive effects of a key traumatic historical event occurring beyond Hong Kong's borders, but in a site with direct implications for Hong Kong. During the night of June 4th, 1989, and following several weeks of martial law, the Tiananmen square in Beijing was violently cleared of demonstrators advocating democratic reform in the People's Republic of China, confirming many Hong Kongers' worst fears about the future of Hong Kong in a post-colonial era. While many Hong Kongers manifested their horror at the June Fourth massacre through vigils and demonstrations, a pragmatic accommodation with fate quickly became the norm among those who chose or had no choice but to remain in Hong Kong. Yet, in some cases the trauma of Tiananmen prompted a far more definitive stance on the PRC and what appeared to be its core dynamics. Anita Mui was one of those who insisted on norms over pragmatics, swearing on principle never to set foot in the PRC again. Although Center Stage involves only the occasional shot of well-known Shanghai landmarks, such as the Bund, and for the most part relies on elaborate sets, location shooting in Shanghai was critical to the artistic success of Center Stage as Kwan understood it. The unintended consequences of Mui's position was thus to trouble Kwan's plans for a more standard biopic, and ultimately to send the Center Stage project in a rather different and far more interesting direction. Indeed, Center Stage as we know it is valued precisely for the way in which meta-cinematic reflections combine with attempts at historical reconstruction and actual footage from Ruan Lingyu's


19

films to produce an intriguingly innovative hybrid work that defies easy classification. As Cheung replaced Mui, so, according to Kwan, did the idea of a sustained tension and dialogue between actresses and historical periods come to replace original notions of make believe underwritten somehow by verisimilitude. The script for Center Stage is the result of the combined efforts, if not actual collaboration, of two key figures, the Taiwanese critic Peggy Chiao and the Shanghai-based scriptwriter Yau Dai An-ping.8 Chiao had spent time in the 1980s studying at UCLA with Zheng Ji Hua, a visiting scholar and leading expert in Chinese film history, and her role was thus to assist Kwan with the various research tasks that Center Stage entailed. In 1990 Chiao accompanied Kwan and his art director, Piu Yau-muk, on research trips to Beijing and Shanghai, where the team consulted libraries and archives, and interviewed film professionals who had either worked with Ruan Lingyu or were familiar with the Shanghai film industry in the 1930s. Recalling the research process in a telephone interview, Chiao emphasized the importance of a series of ad hoc informal interviews with people living in the vicinity of what was once the Lianhua studio. Many of these individuals, Chiao remarked, were the children of parents who had either been actively involved with the studio's activities, or very much attuned to its presence. Referring to the much-cited but somewhat hyperbolic biography of Ruan Lingyu by the Shanghainese scenarist Shen Ji, Chiao further foregrounded the nuanced insight that Kwan and his team were able to derive from some key Hong Kong sources, especially materials belonging to Li Minwei's family. Li Minwei, a pivotal figure in the very emergence of an indigenous Chinese film industry and one of the founders of the Lianhua studio, had kept a detailed personal diary over the years, and Chiao identified this document as providing the inspiration for some of the film's most noteworthy scenes. One such scene appears in the film's concluding moments and shows Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung) kissing each of the Lianhua directors in turn at a dinner

20


party (hosted by Li Minwei and his wife) in what was clearly a private leave-taking, since she committed suicide later that same evening. Reflecting on the ways in which Kwan's project evolved through exchanges with herself and others, Chiao pointed to the director's commitment early on in the research process to making a fictionalized biopic that would mirror the temporal and narrative complexities of Rouge. Rougemoves back and forth between Hong Kong in the 1930s and 80s, establishing what Ackbar Abbas calls 'a double temporal framework' (1997: 75), and Kwan's initial thought was that the story of Ruan Lingyu might lend itself to comparable parallels and comparisons, this time between Shanghai in the 1930s and Hong Kong in the late 1980s. Much like Kwan himself, Chiao clearly recalls the director's initial interest in exploring the more scandalous aspects of Ruan Lingyu's life, the melodrama of her unconventional love life, in a biopic format. Chiao claims to have been more interested from the outset in mobilizing some of the tools and effects of the documentary tradition. A documentary dimension, she allegedly argued, would work to politicize the strategy of parallelism and comparison in ways that a fictionalized biopic could not. Once the basic concept for CenterStagehad been articulated to a significant extent, the scriptwriting task was taken over by Yau Dai An-ping. In Chiao's view, Yau Dai An-ping successfully transformed her own more academic approach to early Chinese film history and Ruan Lingyu's place within it into a detailed script with fully developed characters and very strong dialogue. Kwan recalls the shift from one scriptwriter to another as somewhat more delicate but confirms that the final result commanded the support of all parties involved.

Producers' Decisions, Distributors' Practices I have mentioned in passing that the contemporary classic Center Stage exists, not as a single cinematic text but as a work supported


21

by different instantiations of the film, and it is time now to spell this point out a little more fully. The film that was first screened for audiences at film festivals in Taipei (Golden Horse Awards 1991) and Berlin (the Berlinale 1992) was the original director's cut lasting 148 minutes. When Center Stage was released in Hong Kong in the spring of 1992, the version shown was significantly shorter (121 minutes) and clearly reflected the producers' concerns about the film's marketability. Most viewers, including many Hong Kong film scholars, were unaware until recently of the existence of the director's cut and assumed that the shortened Center Stage film constituted the definitive work. A small number of Hong Kong film aficionados were, however, privy to the quite radical cuts that had been made, and rumour had it that the producer Leonard Ho was largely responsible for the changes and also for destroying the director's cut in an effort to eliminate any possible competition between the original work and its significantly edited version. Remarks by Jonathan Rosenbaum reflect this line of thinking: 'Stanley Kwan's 1991 masterpiece ...is still the greatest Hong Kong film I've seen, though shortening the original running time of 148 minutes by around half an hour has been harmful. (Adding insult to injury, the Hong Kong producers have destroyed the original negative; apparently the uncut version survives only on Australian TV.)'* It is not hard to reconstruct a context that would encourage the kind of decision-making that rumour has attributed to the producers of Center Stage. Kwan's director's cut was clearly something of an anomaly in the early 1990s, an informal convention having emerged in the course of the 1970s to limit films to a running time of approximately 90 minutes. The film critic and independent filmmaker Shu Kei reminds us that it was not uncommon in the late 1980s and early 90s for money-minded distributors significantly to cut foreign films, or to project these films at 28 rather than 24 frames per second so as to allow for additional

22


screenings in the course of the day. The two-hour edited version of Center Stage is thus already a departure from standard practice, and it makes some sense to assume, as Shu Kei suggests, that the control over distribution venues that Jackie Chan and Golden Harvest enjoyed at the time helped to rule out more drastic cuts. It is interesting to note, however, that Stanley Kwan recounts a far less sinister tale. According to Kwan, the original Center Stage was screened in Hong Kong at an event hosted by the Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation in 1991. Kwan recalls the early departure of a significant number of viewers, presumably on account of boredom, as the main motivation for producing a significantly shorter version of the film. He further points out that he was given a free hand throughout the editing process. The cuts, but also the changed colour scheme, are thus to be attributed to Kwan in his capacity as director in rational discussion with supportive producers, and not to high-minded businessmen intent on imposing an extraneous perspective. The edited version is thus also, technically speaking, a director's cut, although it is not the director's preferred and originally intended instantiation of the work. Considering its art house status, the shorter version of Center Stage performed remarkably well at the Hong Kong box office, generating receipts of 7,480,778 Hong Kong dollars at a time when a successful film with more mainstream characteristics could be expected to sell tickets to the tune of anywhere between 10 and 15 million Hong Kong dollars.10 Fortunately, the more interesting and cohesive original director's cut from 1991 became available to audiences shortly after its theatrical release in France in 1999. The DVD produced by Le Studio Canal+ includes in-depth interviews with Kwan (conducted by Jean-Pierre Dionnet) and is a precious resource for anyone interested in understanding the film's production history. In 2005 Fortune Star Entertainment Limited released a digitally remastered version of Center Stage that runs 154 minutes, 6 minutes longer


23

than the 1991 film. The additional length is not, as one might have expected, the result of new images or sequences, but of a slightly slower pace that is noticeable only if the two films are projected simultaneously. We shall have the occasion in the next chapter to reflect at some length on the implications of key differences between the director's cut and the shortened film. I shall be using the term 'director's cut' throughout to refer to the 1991 film. However, any claims pertaining to this director's cut hold equally for the digitally remastered and slightly longer version released in 2005. As we shall see the edited version from 1992 removes much of the documentary footage focusing on exchanges between Kwan and his actors, and introduces a new color scheme that was clearly intended by the producers to facilitate audience comprehension and, more specifically, to disambiguate the complex movement within the film among various logical levels. An interview with Stanley Kwan and the established French scholar of Chinese cinemas, Berenice Reynaud, usefully highlights the distribution problems that Kwan faced as essentially an art house director working with what was once one of the largest Hong Kong studios and distributors. Occasioned by the French premiere of Center Stage this interview was conducted by Lara Melin Siggel in Paris on December 4, 1999. n Kwan drew attention to his rather miserable experience at the 1992 Berlin Festival, where Center Stage was in competition, but largely invisible as a result of Golden Harvest's failure to grasp the dynamics whereby art house films are made salient to audiences and potential buyers. Golden Harvest subsequently sold all of its distribution rights to MediaAsia, but according to Kwan and Reynaud the situation did not improve as a result. MediaAsia, it appears, tended for many years to assume in advance that Center Stage lacked distribution potential. What is more, any genuine expression of interest on the part of foreign distributors quickly became the basis for various larcenous attempts on the part of the distribution company to extract entirely


unrealistic amounts of money from them. At the time of writing, Center Stage had been theatrically distributed only in Hong Kong, France, and Japan. Kwan reports, however, that Yu Dong and his company Baoli Bona are exploring the possibility of theatrical release in the PRC. The success and emergence of Center Stage as a classic of the New Hong Kong Cinema is largely the result, then, of the workings of the festival circuit and of the informal distribution networks that various forms of cinephilia create and sustain.

The Constitution of Center Stage as a Classic of the N e w Hong Kong Cinema Center Stage was met with great interest and admiration on the festival circuit, where it garnered a number of prestigious awards. The jury presiding over the 28th Golden Horse Award in Taipei (towards the end of 1991) singled out Poon Hang-sang and Maggie Cheung as best cinematographer and best actress respectively. Cheung's remarkable performance as Ruan Lingyu, but also as the actress and emerging star Maggie Cheung, was further honoured at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival (February 12February 24, 1992), where Center Stage received a Silver Bear for best actress. Kwan's innovative biopic aroused considerable interest at the 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival (April 10-April 25,1992), and received a large number of awards at the 12th Hong Kong Film Awards: best actress (Maggie Cheung), best cinematography (Poon Hang-sang), best art direction (Piu Yaumuk), and best original film score (Hsiao Chung). The digitally remastered film was shown at the 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival, where it was featured as follows: 'Unimpeachable in its stature, Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage is now enshrined within the pantheon of the greatest Chinese films. For the centennial


25

anniversary of Chinese cinema, we are proud to present a world premiere of the digitally remastered and newly restored director's cut of this classic' (HKIFF programme: 2005). The film's inclusion and special place in the festival marked the entry of the director's cut into the consciousness of Hong Kong viewers for whom the cinematic work and classic entitled Center Stage had simply been, with rare exceptions, the 1992 edited version. The journalistic discourse initially generated by Center Stage in Hong Kong was in many ways disappointing. The Cantonese discussion was largely star-driven and focused almost exclusively on Maggie Cheung's Silver Bear, the first such award to have been won by a Chinese actor. Li Cheuk-to, one of the territory's most important film critics, did, however, discuss the film's formal properties in Guanyiji: zhongwai dianyingpian {Reading against the grain: Chinese and foreign films), his main point being that the multiply layered narrative devised by Kwan seemed somewhat haphazard and reflected an apparent indecisiveness with regard to an abundance of research materials.12 The English-language South China Morning Postprovided a fairly detailed review of the film in March 1992. This was written by the American journalist and actor, Paul Fonoroff, who, as one reviewer of At the Hong Kong Movies: 600 Reviews from 1988 till the Handover (1998) puts it, 'displays such a tremendous disdain for contemporary HK films that it is difficult to imagine why he would choose a career in reviewing them'.13 Unsurprisingly, then, Center Stage won little praise and a fair amount of harsh criticism from Fonoroff: 'those looking for insights into Ruan's life and death will find few on hand in Center Stage, an early contender for the dubious distinction of most pretentious production of 1992 ... in terms of feelings and insights, Center Stage is the cinematic equivalent of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum' (1998: 206-7). A consistently positive journalistic discourse about the film has, however, emerged in the more than ten years that have elapsed since it was first released. Recent

26


comments by BBC's Tom Dawson in connection with the ICA Hong Kong film festival are characteristic of this discourse: '"Actress" is an ambitiously unorthodox biopic from director Stanley Kwan about Chinese star Ruan Lingyu.' 14 Equally representative is the characterization provided by Channel 4: 'Ruan's story is a winning example of moving, psychologically convincing storytelling. It forms the emotional foundation of a highly complex, scrupulously intelligent and above all, heartfelt film.'15 Encompassing discussions of nostalgia, genre, queer spectatorship, allegory, and stardom, the more scholarly literature that now surrounds Center Stage has played a particularly important role in defining the film's status as a central text.

Center Stage as nostalgia

film

Combing the Greek terms nostos (to return home) and algia (a painful condition), nostalgia was coined in the late seventeenth century by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer (1688) to describe the symptoms of Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad: In the brain, specifically where images of the desired and familiar places are located, vital spirits surge back and forth through the nerve fibres that store the impressions of the native land. The repeated motion of these vital spirits gradually tires them out to the point where they get out of control and start to move of their own accord, evoking the same images over and over again. Eventually, the only images produced in the brain of the diseased are those of home, (cited in Ritivoi 2002, 15) The meanings of'nostalgia' have changed considerably since Hofer's time, for whereas the term once identified a pathological and even life-threatening condition, it is now typically used to evoke a rather benign sense of longing prompted by a concept of irretrievability or loss.


27

Over the past fifteen years or so, nostalgia has received considerable attention from film scholars of various national cinemas. In a British context, for example, nostalgia is associated with what Andrew Higson calls 'heritage film', prototypical instances of this type of filmmaking being Chariots of Fire (1981), A Room with a View (1986), Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), and the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster's Howards End (1992). Higson's account of heritage film locates its 'central pleasures' in 'the artful and spectacular projection of an elite, conservative vision of the national past' (Higson 1996: 233), and it is this essentially conservative, elitist and in many instances ethnic nationalist dimension of the prototypical heritage film that makes the genre ideologically problematic. The ideological thrust of the bourgeois heritage film is supported, following Higson, by a 'museum aesthetic' involving a lingering gaze oriented toward a series of heritage fetishes capable of signifying the nation. In a Hong Kong context, 'nostalgia' figures centrally within a discourse about nostalgia film, rather than heritage film. In nostalgia film (unlike the related genre discussed by Higson), the sense of loss is invariably traceable to a particular historical event and its implications. The handover of 1997 and the unique postcolonial condition — based on absorption rather than autonomy — that it introduced provide the conceptual bases for the cluster of emotions that the Hong Kong nostalgia film ultimately targets. Natalia Chan Sui-hung, a film scholar at Hong Kong's Chinese University, has done much to clarify the origins and workings of Hong Kong nostalgia film. Chan identifies four types of nostalgia films: The first group reconstructs the history and social scene of 1960s Hong Kong .... The second group includes those films that represent 1930s Hong Kong and China, such as Stanley Kwan's Rouge and Center Stage {Ruan Lingyu, 1992). The third group


refers to those that recycle the film titles or story events of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong cinema.... The final type aims to re-create the ancient history in China in terms of the costume genre. (2002: 257) Chan draws attention to key differences between the historical film and nostalgia film, identifying at least a putative 'authenticity of historical reference' as a feature of the former and 'history ... represented in a stylized or allegorical form' as a feature of the latter (257). Chan's categorization of Center Stage as an instance of nostalgia film is by no means controversial. Indeed, in his discussion of Center Stage and its contributions to the biopic genre, Julien Stringer remarks that 'there is the suggestion [in Center Stage as in Rouge] that the past is more attractive, intense, and memorable than the present', commenting further that this past 'is a deliberately selective and "unofficial" past' (1997: 34). In her Harvard dissertation from 2000, The Cultural Politics of Nostalgia in Contemporary Hong Kong Film and Memoir, Daisy Ng concludes her discussion of CenterStageby evoking its innovative relation to more standard instances of the nostalgia film: 'nostalgia in Center Stage is not a lament for an irretrievable past but a dialectic of the past and the present' (2000: 59).

Center Stage as women's

film

In his introduction to the program for the 16th Hong Kong International Film Festival, Li Cheuk-to refers to Center Stage as 'the latest installment of Stanley Kwan's "women movies", another high melodrama' (1992: 108). The tendency to trace continuities between Center Stage and Kwan's earlier explorations of women's subjectivity is also evident in Reynaud's 'Glamour and Suffering: Gong Li and the History of Chinese Stars': 'There wouldn't be female stars without "women's directors". Zhang Yimou might be Sternberg


29

to Gong Li, but Stanley Kwan is the Cukor of Hong Kong. Not only has he given Anita Mui, Sylvia Chang, Maggie Cheung and Siqin Gaowa some of their most fulfilling roles, but he has explored the seductions of female stardom by directing a complex video portrait of Siqin Gaowa and by paying homage to Ruan Lingyu in Actress, a film as alluring, fragile and mysterious as its subject' (1993: 28). Kwan's own pronouncements support the idea of continuity between an early film such as Love unto Waste and Center Stage. In Yang + Fin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, Kwan's voice-over commentary ponders the reasons for his systematic gravitation towards women in Red Rose, White Rose, Actress, Rouge, and Love unto Waste. 'Why,' Kwan asks, 'do I make so many films about women?' The documentary goes on to provide partial answers to this question by foregrounding Kwan's early role as head of the family, and his relation to a mother and sisters who were particularly protective of him, thereby inspiring certain deep attachments and sympathies. Center Stage as queer

text

The concluding moments of Yang + Yin document an exchange between Kwan and his mother in which the filmmaker refers to his gay sexuality, encouraging her to articulate her feelings about his sexual orientation. As a result of this footage, the BFI documentary effectively became the vehicle for Kwan's open acknowledgement of his gay identity. A central element in the authorial legend that has emerged around Kwan is the idea that Yang + Yin marks a decisive turning point in his career, the transition, more specifically, from women's films to films about men and gay sexuality. Kwan's sexual orientation, and, more important, his attitude towards his identity as a gay man, thus become a way of making sense of his early tendency to explore the lives of women in a predominantly melodramatic mode. As Kwan himself points out in the commentary


accompanying Yang + Yin, there is a direct correlation between his closeted gayness up until 1996 and his systematic projection of his own gay sexuality onto the women in his melodramatic women's films from the same period. Reynaud's 'Center Stage. A Shadow in Reverse' (2003) takes this insight and makes it the basis for an extended reflection on Kwan's Ruan Lingyu film. Drawing on the psychoanalytic writings of Tania Modleski, Reynaud focuses on the interplay of identification and obj edification that connects male subjectivity to the figure of the 'suffering woman' through the double process of denial and displacement: 'the male finds it necessary to repress certain "feminine" aspects of himself, and to project these ... onto the woman, who does the suffering for both of them'. (2003: 31; quote within the quote is from Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 1988) Kwan's sexual orientation is held by Reynaud to generate an 'ambivalence toward femininity' that is concretized in the behaviour of the man who in the opening moments of the film proposes to play the role that the Lianhua filmmakers are shown discussing in connection with Ruan Lingyu. In this reading, then, Center Stage is driven by a complicated psychological process in which identification with the suffering woman gives way on some occasions to a competitive relation to the figure who represents her (Maggie Cheung). Reynaud's interpretation is carefully grounded in detailed evidence culled from the film, and her references to the 'bathhouse sissy' (2003: 31) evoked above, or to the documentary footage in which Kwan and Cheung 'compete to impersonate Ruan' (2003: 32), help her to make a convincing case for seeing Center Stage as a cinematic work with a genuinely queer dimension.


Center Stage as

31

allegory

As a central film in the emerging canon of the New Hong Kong cinema, Center Stage, not surprisingly, has also been discussed in allegorical terms having to do with the handover. As Jeremy Tambling notes in his monograph on Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together, allegorical readings that rely on isolated phrases or scenes to generate momentous meanings ultimately trivialize the work under discussion (2003: 13). Julian Stringer's 'Center Stage'. Reconstructing the Bio-Pic' provides an excellent account of Kwan's innovations within the biopic genre, but it also shows signs of some of the allegorizing gestures that Tambling would appear to have in mind. Stringer identifies the aim of his discussion as follows: '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 "postcolonial" future' (1997: 28). Textual evidence in support of this aim is provided in the way of references to Kwan's question to Maggie Cheung early on in the film. This question asks whether the Hong Kong actress would like to be remembered some 50 years hence, allegedly recalling the terms of the SinoBritish Joint Declaration in which provisions were made for 'one country, two systems' within a fifty-year time-frame. Stringer also highlights the scene in which the actress Li Lili parodies lines spoken by Ruan Lingyu in Sun Yu's Little Toys', 'the enemy is coming, the enemy is coming.' The scene, as Stringer remarks, is designed to draw attention to film censorship in 1933, the intention having originally been to have Ruan Lingyu exclaim 'the Japanese are coming.' While clearly suggestive, these scenes cannot provide sufficient warrant for Stringer's conclusion: 'In Center Stage, then, 1930s Shanghai and 1990s Hong Kong are

32


clearly contrasted as modern, cosmopolitan cities that suffer invasion by an occupying force (the Japanese and Communists respectively), and this t h e m e is worked out through the experiences of a tragically doomed yet beautiful woman who represents the city itself (1997: 39). Stringer's argument fails to grasp the deeper cultural significance of Center Stage which lies entirely elsewhere, in the positive connections, I contend, that it draws between aspects of the Hong Kong filmmaking milieu and moments in early Chinese film history. It will be the task of the final chapter to spell this point out more fully.

Center Stage and the dynamics

of

stardom

A number of critical commentaries on Center Stage foreground the phenomenon of stardom, and especially the significance of maintaining a certain distance throughout between the legendary star Ruan Lingyu and the actress who stands in for her as an emerging star in her own right, Maggie Cheung. In 'Specular Failure and Spectral Returns in Two Films with Maggie Cheung (and one without),' Carlos Rojas argues that Center Stage points 'to the way in which new forms of auratic presence can be carved out within the system of correspondences established by technologies of mechanical reproduction themselves' (2001: 5). Brett Farmer highlights the same tension between Ruan Lingyu and Maggie Cheung in 'Memoire en abime: Remembering (through) Center Stag el his point being that it fosters 'competing star images' and thereby 'new formations of hybridized meaning and desire' (2000: 3). The most probing discussion of stardom in Center Stage is to be found in Ackbar Abbas's Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, where several pages are devoted to a contrastive analysis of Rouge and Center Stage. Whereas Rouge is quite literally a tale about a ghost, Center Stage, Abbas argues, is a critical


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investigation of the processes that create 'legend and gossip', thereby 'turning an actress into a ghost' (1997: 47).16 The evident purpose in Center Stage, claims Abbas, is by no means that of the biographer, for the point is 'not to establish the facts, which are only too much there, but to interpret them, to speculate about them' (46). Stars have been theorized in a myriad of ways, and Abbas avails himself of two key citations to evoke the basic conception of stardom with which he is operating. 'The star,' claims Paul Virilio, 'is only a spectre of absorption proposed to the gaze of the spectator, a ghost that you can interview.' And 'fame,' Rainer Maria Rilke contends, 'is no more than the sum of misunderstandings gathered around a great name' (cited in Abbas 1997: 46). Loose talk and misunderstandings are elements, then, in a process of effacement wherein the putative object of discussion largely disappears from view. In Abbas's interpretation of Rouge and Center Stage, Kwan's 'obsession with ghostly figures' becomes 'a method of evoking and representing critically the space of the deja disparu' (1997: 47). This is a space that somehow defines postcolonial Hong Kong, Hong Kong identity having become a driving and 'visible' concern in the very moment when its disappearance, in the form of the handover to China, was envisaged. Yet, Hong Kong's disappearance is not only a result of the Joint-Declaration of 1984, for a colonial interest in negating indigenous identity construction has long dovetailed with stereotypic representations to hamper the disclosure of Hong Kong's structuring principles and ever mutating properties. In its resistance to cliches understood as biographical probings, and in its insistence on the evidentiary nature of Ruan Lingyu's legacy as an actress and in the form of her films, Center Stage effectively thwarts the kind of cultural effacement with which Abbas is concerned. Following Abbas, then, the investigation of stardom in Center Stage bears directly on deeper issues having to do with the implications of cliched thinking about Hong Kong. The significance of Center Stage for Hong Kong Cultural Studies is thus shown to

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reside, not in individual scenes or particular pronouncements with apparently obvious political connotations, but in the salience of concerns that pervade the entire cinematic work. The New Hong Kong Cinema is often explored in terms of the problems and paradoxes involved in articulating a Hong Kong identity almost ex nihilo, colonial bureaucracies having systematically discouraged self-confident expressions or mutual understandings of what it means to be a Hong Kong person. What is at stake in the New Hong Kong Cinema is the clarification of various identity-based issues and the recognition, both internally by Hong Kongers and externally by audiences elsewhere, of the worth of, or contribution made by, Hong Kong culture in some broad sense. The point is that when we speak of the New Hong Kong Cinema we have in mind, not the brute or indiscriminate collection of all works made since 1984, but particular films that grapple with the complexities of an atypically prosperous postcolonial small nation as it contemplates and experiences its transformation, through integration spanning a period of 50 years, into one of the largest (in every sense of the term) nations of the world. Cinematic works qualifying for inclusion in the still emerging canon in question bring into public space various largely inchoate understandings of nonetheless crucial Hong Kong realities, and in ways that are of compelling interest. The production history of Center Stage provides evidence of the film's imbrication with a kairotic temporality generated by the prospect of Hong Kong's mutation from small to large nation. The history of the film's reception points to its vital capacity to draw critics, scholars, and audiences into the space of probing questions that it effectively generates. The challenge now is to understand exactly how Center Stage produces the effects that it does, how it operates as a semiotic system prompting various productions of meaning. It is time, then, to turn to a careful formal analysis of the original director's cut and the significantly edited version of Center Stage.

2 Film Style

Formal cinematic analysis can be part of a more general project of aesthetic appreciation that aspires to draw attention to, and to value, various formal properties for their own sake, or as indicators of noteworthy innovation within larger cinematic traditions that themselves warrant appreciation on aesthetic or specifically cinematic grounds. To engage in formal analysis, however, is not necessarily to be committed to formalism or to the idea of formal appreciation as an end in and of itself. Indeed, the task of providing a clear and accurate account of a film's formal elements (and of the way in which these elements are made to work together) may simply be viewed as a means of arriving at reasoned arguments about its intended and likely effects or deeper cultural significance. In the last decade or so, teaching and research on film in disciplines other than film studies have disseminated a concept of film as more or less reducible to thematic components with broadly political, ideological, and cultural implications. Yet, it remains the case that even themes emerge as a result of an interplay of elements

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encompassing far more than characters' pronouncements and actions, the most likely candidates for thematic analysis. Indeed, even in cases where the goal is ultimately to grasp a film's broader cultural implications and relevance, we would do well to pay careful attention to formal properties derived, among other things, from lighting arrangements, framing, camera movements and angles, mise-en-scene, and sound/image relations. Formal properties provide sensory triggers for many different kinds of responses, ranging from the quasi-automatic and apparently universal to the cognitively more sophisticated and culturally inflected (see Bordwell 1996). They alert viewers to a given film's relation to established genre conventions or very broad types of filmmaking, just as they provide clues as to the kind of uptake that is intended or appropriate. Formal analysis is a powerful analytic tool, whether the aspiration is to appreciate a given work in aesthetic terms, to spell out its deeper meanings, or to understand its actual effects in the world. Like most film classics, Center Stage is a film that repays attention to form. The aim in the formal analysis that follows is threefold: to provide an account of Kwan's approach that draws attention to ontological differences among three kinds of images in Center Stage; to describe key differences between the 1991 director's cut (essentially identical to the digitally remastered director's cut from 2005) and the significantly edited version, while highlighting the implications of some of the excisions; and, finally, to situate the film in relation to various epistemological issues that arise in connection with non-fiction filmmaking.

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The Cinematic Image as Historical Trace, Documentary Record, and Interpretive Reconstruction Center Stage combines elements of the biopic with aspects of the documentary to produce a narrative that involves both fictional and non-fictional elements, attitudes oriented respectively towards make believe and belief. Kwan inscribes the life of Ruan Lingyu within the biopic's typical project of make believe, but he also makes this real historicalfigurethe object of the kind of genuine cinematic assertions (or constatives) that leading theorists of documentary and non-fiction film consider to be decisive in determining a given narrative's nonfictional nature (Plantinga 1997; Ponech 1999). Much of the complexity and interest of Center Stage stems from this innovative interplay betweenfictionand non-fiction, andfromthe cognitive processes that are encouraged as a result. Kwan, we shall see, uses three significantly different types of images to create an intentionally hybrid form of filmmaking that is designed to encourage certain epistemological virtues, not only in viewers, but also in thefilm'smakers. The complexity associated with Center Stage has a lot to do with the status of various sequences of images as fiction or nonfiction, and especially with the way in which Kwan forces viewers to recognize the need to revisit initial assumptions about this matter. While the reflexive awareness that Kwan encourages has implications for how viewers interpret the actions and events that make up the film's plot, the narrative strategy governing the actual sequencing of actions and events is relatively straightforward. Center Stage is framed by several minutes' worth of introductory material that serves to establish the film's general orientation and problematic. The film opens with stills from Ruan Lingyu's early films, accompanied by what the viewer will come to recognize as Stanley Kwan's voice-over commentary: 'These are stills from when she began filming at 16. Some of the prints are no longer available.

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... They say she was mostly given trivial roles ... Only after joining Lianhua in 1929 did she have a chance to be in serious films.' The stills from these early films are followed by a brief sequence in which Maggie Cheung, qua Maggie Cheung, reflects on similarities and differences between herself and Ruan Lingyu. Cheung's response to the director's interview-style question as to whether she herself wishes to be remembered some fifty years after her death effectively identifies Ruan Lingyu as both a tragic and a legendary figure. The framing material comprising stills from Ruan Lingyu's early films and documentary footage related to the making of Center Stage thus helps to direct attention towards three central issues: Ruan Lingyu's emergence as a serious actress, her tragic death, and her legendary status. Having clearly identified acting, tragedy, and stardom as the crucial phenomena with which Center Stage will engage, Kwan punctuates the shift from frame to story with the film's credit title: 'Center Stage! For the most part, the plot of Center Stage relies on a concept of chronological progression, the preference throughout being to tell the story of Ruan Lingyu in a way that begins at the stipulated beginning — the moment when she is given serious roles — and moves systematically toward the end — her tragic suicide at the age of 25. Kwan's narrative begins with a lengthy scene — marked as taking place in 1929 and situated in a Shanghai bathhouse — in which Li Minwei, Sun Yu, and other key figures associated with the newly founded Lianhua Film Studio discuss the future of the Chinese film industry, their hopes for the new studio, Ruan Lingyu's potential as a star capable of rivaling already established stars such as Hu Tieh, and plans to cast Ruan Lingyu in two specific films, Memories of the OldCapital'and Wild Flower. The narrative then moves forward chronologically, concluding with a series of scenes that anticipate or actually show Ruan Lingyu's death. Emphasis is placed on the star's flamboyantly flirtatious, but ultimately entirely private farewell to the Lianhua directors at a social gathering hosted

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by Li Minwei, on her ingestion of sleeping pills, on her articulation (first internally and then in writing) of suicide notes addressed to Tang Jishan and Zhang Damin, and, finally, on the intense grief that her death entails, not only for her adopted child and mother, but for the Lianhua colleagues who were also her friends. Titles and dates accompanying clips from Ruan Lingyu's existing films or Kwan's reconstruction of scenes from lost films create a strong sense of temporal progression throughout. Scenes reconstructing the shooting of the films in question alternate with evocations of Ruan's personal life, as well as of the impact of larger political forces on the Lianhua group. Kwan goes to some lengths, for example, to establish Ruan Lingyu's friendship with the Lianhua actresses Lin Chuchu (Cecilia Yip Tung) and Li Lili (Carina Lau), to provide insight into the dynamics of Ruan Lingyu's affairs with Zhang Damin and Tang Jishan, and to suggest an emerging involvement with Cai Chusheng. The complicated political developments that provided the larger context for Chinese filmmaking in the 1930s are evoked by means of the Lianhua group's responses to the annexation of Manchuria by Japan in the September 18th incident (1931), and to Japan's subsequent invasion of Shanghai in 1932. The resulting narrative focusing on the reciprocal causality between aspects of Ruan's personal and professional lives, with occasional reference to larger political forces, is punctuated throughout by shots documenting Kwan and his team as they research, discuss, and shoot the film. Center Stage draws on three quite different types of images, each of which plays distinctive roles within the overall narrative and within the rhetorical argument that this narrative suggests. Let us look at each of the types in turn, beginning with those images that can be termed historical traces. The criteria for inclusion in this particular category are both temporal and referential. That is, for an image to count as an historical trace there must be reason to believe that it provides visual information about scenes that


occurred in Shanghai in the 1930s and that either involved Ruan Lingyu directly or were relevant somehow to her situation. As Carl Plantinga points out, 'the iconic function is one function of the photographic image, not automatic and not the only function' (1997: 53). In those instances, however, in which an image is composed in such a way as to present 'visual information similar to that available to an observer at the profilmic scene' (53), it can be said to function iconically. Kwan mobilizes a number of stills, clips, and photographs from the 1930s, all of which are presented as having a kind of self-validating significance and priority by virtue of their self-evident iconic relation to the actress who largely constitutes the film's thematic aboutness. These iconic images can be made to serve a number of different functions, as we shall see. The point, however, is to note that within the overall rhetoric of the film these images have a foundational and almost epiphanic quality on account of their relative proximity to the source that motivates the very making of Center Stage. Let us look more closely at some examples of these historical traces. Early on in the film Maggie Cheung plays Ruan Lingyu playing the lead in Kwan's reconstruction of Sun Yu's Wild Flower from 1930. Cheung as Ruan Lingyu is first shown engaging in a private, impromptu rehearsal of a scene that Kwan has the character Sun Yu describe, and even to some extent enact, in the Shanghai bathhouse sequence with which Center Stage begins. A cut, followed by a change of camera angles and setting, marks the shift from this private rehearsal to what viewers are to regard as a simulation or approximation of a key melodramatic scene from Sun Yu's lost film. Sprawled in the snow Ruan Lingyu (Cheung) bites her finger in order to nourish with her own blood the baby she is cradling. Following a close-up of Cheung's anguished face, Kwan cuts to a series of short clips showing Ruan Lingyu using certain facial expressions and hand gestures to express grief. In the director's cut, these clips are followed by shots of Kwan describing the

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expressions as quintessential^ Ruan Lingyu to Cheung and other members of his cast and crew. Kwan goes on to remark that whereas he initially found Ruan Lingyu 'ordinary', further viewing of her films led him to think of her as 'exceptional.' In this instance Kwan makes maximal use of the epiphanic potential'that attaches to the iconic image qua historical trace. The rapid succession of remarkably similar clips makes manifest Ruan's unique manner and exceptional expressive abilities; the aim is somehow to arrange the images so that they quite simply disclose her being as an actress. It is worth noting that the dramatic transition from Cheung's face to that of Ruan in a sharp edit helps to reinforce the concept of a distinctive individual style and talent. Indeed, this concept is almost automatically prompted by the sudden burst of partly redundant visual information. A relatively straightforward example of historical traces can be found in a long, uninterrupted sequence from Bu Wancang's The Peach Girl{Taohua QiXueJi, 1931). Occurring early on in the film, the traces in question would seem to serve the purpose of familiarizing viewers with the typical look of a Ruan Lingyu film. Viewers are given the opportunity to pay attention to questions having to do with narrative and visual style, with mise-en-scene, body language, and so on. In this case the historical traces create a somewhat lasting image of Ruan Lingyu, and thus a persistent point of contrast for Cheung's Ruan Lingyu. This point is important for Kwan is very clear about his intention to ensure that viewers relate to Cheung as Cheung playing Ruan Lingyu and never quite simply as Ruan Lingyu. The third instance of historical traces occurs in the form of clips from Sun Yu's Little Toys {Xiao Wanyi, aka Small Toys and Gimmicks, 1933) following scenes in which Kwan simulates the original shooting of the film, focusing on Li Lili's putative acting problems and Ruan Lingyu's alleged guidance on the matter. The simulated scene picks up on earlier statements made by Li Lili in

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an interview that Kwan partially includes, but also summarizes in a voice-over commentary: 'the first production between Li Lili and Ruan was Little Toys. In our casual chat with her she emphasized how Ruan taught her to act in that movie and how they became good friends as a result. Ruan didn't speak Mandarin well and Lili taught her.' The reconstruction shows Ruan Lingyu (Cheung) and Li Lili (Carina Lau) discussing the need for emotional restraint on the part of the daughter (Li/Lau) as she dies in the arms of her mother (Ruan/Cheung). Attuned to this very issue, the character Sun Yu is shown proposing a particular gesture that a clip from the Ruan Lingyu film subsequently foregrounds. The actual historical traces to which Kwan cuts show the character played by Li Lili reaching up to catch a tear from the corner of her mother's weeping eye. This gesture is initiated in the beginning of Small Toys where Li's character (as a child) is crying and her mother flicks her tear onto a toy. Whereas the original gesture is comical and sweet, its imitation has a certain melodramatic quality that is highlighted through a close up of Li Lili's hand as she flicks the tear from her finger. In this case the iconicity of the historical traces is used to establish what we might call a cinematic explanandum. In philosophical parlance the term 'explanandum' refers to that which requires explanation, whereas the term 'explanans' identifies the elements in an argument that furnish the requisite explanation. In the context of a biopic with pronounced documentary traits it is not unreasonable to assume that one of the projected goals will be to explain or shed light on aspects of the relevant individual's life. Indeed, Kwan orients the viewer towards questions having to do with talent, stardom, and tragedy early on. With their epiphanic disclosure of exceptionally moving acting, the historical traces call for contexts, interpretations, and explanations that can help to make sense of the unique contributions, not only of Ruan Lingyu, but Li Lili. In Kwan's cinematic argument the interview with Li Lili combines with a process of reconstruction and simulation to provide

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an appropriate and plausible explanans for the historical traces that follow and for the explanandum that they effectively constitute. Another interesting example of the use of historical traces can be found in a sequence of scenes dealing with the theme of resistance. The first of these scenes shows Tang Jishan (Chin Han) playing mahjong with Ruan Lingyu's mother and other women with whom he interacts somewhat flirtatiously. A cut transports the viewer to the bedroom upstairs where Ruan (Cheung) is shown smoking a cigarette. Historical traces erupt into this scene in the form of a clip from Wu Yonggang's extraordinary film from 1934 entitled The Goddess (Shennii). The images in question show the prostitute played by Ruan Lingyu resisting the male who exploits and harasses her, by blowing smoke in his face. The next edit returns the viewer to the bedroom where Tang Jishan (Chin Han) joins Ruan Lingyu (Cheung), who blows smoke in his face in a manner reminiscent of the central character in Wu's film. Ruan is shown querying Tang about choices he might make if she and the women downstairs were prostitutes, and this scene is followed by yet another clip from The Goddess. In this case the historical traces are accompanied by a voice-over that is meant to be attributed to Wu as he directs Ruan (Cheung) in Kwan's simulation of the original shooting scene: 'Lingyu, you know you can't get out of this rascal's clutches. Sad in heart you put on an icy face, walk from here to the table and sit on it. You tell Chang Chihchih to pass you a cigarette. You flick it once with a finger and Chang lights it for you. Chang, you light it ingratiatingly. A minor favour. It is a man's common trick to seduce a girl.' The historical traces then give way to a title credit and year — The Goddess 1934 — and to the character Wu directing Ruan (Cheung) on the concept of resistance in a simulated reconstruction: 'Sitting on the table means resistance, and so does smoking. The whole posture is resistance. But you're too weak willed and you know it. This should be visible from your eyes.' Cheung is shown playing the scene in question, and this

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reenactment is followed by a final clip from The Goddess which shows us Ruan performing the actions described by the Wu character. The historical traces and the visual information they convey in the form of virtually self-evident concepts of power, exploitation, and resistance become the basis for hypothesizing about the psychology of acting and especially about the implications of play acting for everyday life. Evidence for this claim can be found in the sequencing of images for which Kwan opts, temporal, and by implication, causal priority being given to the historical trace. First we see Ruan resisting through smoking in The Goddess, then we see Cheung-as-Ruan resisting through smoking in an interpretive reconstruction of Ruan's personal life. The editing clearly suggests that Ruan Lingyu learnt something about resistance and its expression from her play acting in Wu's film, and that she carried some of the acquired knowledge into her tumultuous relationship with Tang Jishan and others. This visually articulated hypothesis is further underscored verbally towards the end of the film when Ruan (Cheung) kisses Wu Yonggang and clearly states that it was he who taught her how to resist. The historical traces, in short, establish a hypothesis about the causal efficacy of make believe for at least some of those who become the instruments of its production. Ruan emerges as someone who, rather than insisting on the frames of fiction, constantly toyed in her mind with their dissolution, thereby inviting the risk of possible cross-modal destabilization. Causal chains leading from fiction to everyday life (and fuelled by imitation of, and persistent identification with fictional characters) involve clear risks. This is especially true, we are to assume, if the roles are deeply tragic, as they were in the case of Ruan Lingyu, at least during her years with the Lianhua studio. Kwan's inclusion of shots from Cai Chusheng's New Woman (1934) towards the end of Center Stage also warrants discussion in connection with a concept of historical traces. However,

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inasmuch as the scenes in question (and their more general framing or contextualization) go to the heart of Kwan's strategies as a documentary filmmaker, analysis of these particular iconic images is best undertaken in a subsequent moment devoted to epistemological issues and documentary form. One last historical trace deserves brief mention here, namely the image of Ruan Lingyu lying in state at the Wanguo Funeral home, with which the director's cut and shortened version of the film conclude. The camera lingers on this final trace in what can only be described as a meditative manner, encouraging viewers to ponder more conclusively what they do and do not know as a result of the film they have just seen. Contrasting starkly with the reconstructions and film clips, this still image of Ruan's dead body seems quiet, almost mute, communicating only death. The concluding image, its nature and persistence, provide support for the idea that the aim in Center Stage is to draw attention to the difficulties of historical retrieval. As Berenice Reynaud puts it: 'Under the shimmering seduction of appearances, Kwan weaves a dialectic between the visible and the invisible. ... Now you see Ruan Lingyu, now you don't - or maybe a little bit of her, a reflection, a copy, or a trace' (Reynaud 2003: 32). The second category of images is defined by a manifest commitment to the idea of documenting the process of researching and shooting Center Stage. Much as in the case of the historical traces, iconicity is an important feature of these images for they are presented as providing some kind of record of the real-world actions and situations that ultimately give shape to Center Stage. Yet there are important differences between the historical traces and the documentary images, and it is for this reason that we need two categories, rather than merely one, to do justice to the many heavily iconic images in Center Stage. The historical images convey less information than Kwan, and by extension, the viewers of his film, in fact desire. The point is precisely that they register as mere


traces, as tantalizing but not fully legible signs, of a person about whom the director, actors, and viewers can never know enough. The situation is quite different in the case of the documentary images (and soundtrack that accompanies them), for they are replete with information. The sense of informational plenitude that characterizes the documentary sequences stems in part from the first-person authority that resides in Kwan in his capacity as author/ director of the film. The viewer understands that Kwan has been fully involved in the process of articulating and executing the cinematic project that he seeks to describe in a series of documentary images. The authority that attaches to his role implies the privilege of a certain perspicuous overview, a high degree of executive control, and, as a result, the ability to shoot, choose, and present the very images that are most likely to convey fully the information that is needed. Inasmuch as the documentary images record the researching and making of a film, they involve an element of second-order reflection. That is, they are not simply about filmmaking in Shanghai in the 1930s, as some documentary images might be, but about a film that adopts this historical period and its central actress as its focus. Kwan's documentary images are, then, meta-cinematic, and their role, not surprisingly, is to introduce an element of reflexivity that gives the film a scope extending well beyond that of the typical biopic. Kwan puts the point as follows in conversation with Jean-Pierre Dionnet: It is a story about filmmaking .... The film shows how much I appreciate and admire directors like Fei Mu and Sun Yu, and those great actors — not just Ruan Lingyu, but also Li Lili and Chen Yanyan. ... It's a film about film. There's a comparison between the 1930s, on the one hand, and the film crew on the other — me, the photographer, actors like Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau. We show our admiration; how much we admire or appreciate filmmaking in the 1930s. (DVD interview, Center Stage)

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The documentary images include: l) Interviews with Ruan Lingyu's colleagues and contemporaries: the script writer Shen Ji, the actors Li Lili and Chen Yanyan, and the director Sun Yu (in the director's cut; at this point all of these images carry a strong sense of pathos inasmuch as none of the interviewees are alive today). 2) Kwan's conversations and interview-like exchanges with the Hong Kong actors, most notably Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau. 3) Shots documenting the shooting of Center Stage. 4) A shot documenting the now dilapidated site of the Lianhua studio in 1991 when Kwan was doing research in Shanghai. The third category of images on which Kwan relies heavily in Center Stage encompasses all of the interpretive reconstructions that help to flesh out a cohesive narrative about Ruan Lingyu —scenes focusing on her work as a major film star, on the milieu in which she worked, and on the social dynamics leading to her tragic death. To qualify for inclusion in this category an image must involve an element of speculation and extrapolation. Interestingly the principle underwriting the construction of these images is spelled out very explicitly by Kwan in one of the documentary scenes towards the end of the director's cut of Center Stage (the scene in question was removed from the shorter and far more widely circulated version of the film). In an interpretive reconstruction that imagines the Lianhua directors' highly personal, yet publicly articulated responses to Ruan's death, Kwan has Wu Yonggang recall Ruan's farewell kiss the night before and her flirtatious insistence on the idea that it was he who taught her the very concept of resistance. Wu's statements at the corpse's side elaborate further on Ruan's thought as the director evokes the use of alcohol and cigarettes to signify resistance. A documentary insert some moments later shows Kwan in conversation with the actors, and especially the actor playing Wu Yonggang. Kwan holds up an old black-and-white photograph and says: 'We do not know whether Wu Yonggang actually said that. We invented that particular line. All we have is this photograph.'

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The interpretive reconstructions involve 'what if scenarios that have only a tenuous relation to what passes for fact. It is historically the case that Ruan Lingyu committed suicide by eating a bowl of congee full of sleeping pills. And it makes sense to assume that she somehow, before dying, took leave of her mother, adopted child, and lover, all of whom are known to have been in the house when she committed suicide. What form that leave taking took can, however, only be a matter of speculation, and it is precisely the task of the fictionalized reconstructions to provide more or less plausible narratives that help tofillin the gaps that separate one bit of apparently factual historical knowledge from the next. It is important to note that any such plausibility derives from the internal coherence of the various imaginings, from the way in which they become mutually supportive and reinforcing, and not from their relation to historical fact. The imaginings may find a starting point, but can never find full and complete support, in historical facts. The interpretive reconstructions are always already speculative. In thinking about the relation between such reconstructions and what passes for the truth of historical knowledge it is helpful to evoke Castoriadis's concept of etayage (1998). Castoriadis introduces this idea of something somehow leaning against something else in order to explain aspects of the relation between socially instituted imaginaries and an external mind-independent reality, between nomos (the sphere of institutions and culture) and physis (the sphere of nature). Distancing himself from the kind of radical relativism that would grant social imaginaries complete autonomy from physis, Castoriadis makes a case for seeing the workings of the imagination as gently and selectively drawing on aspects of the real. The thinking is not unlike that described by Kwan when he makes a definitely existing black-and-white photo of grieving directors the starting point for an elaborate scene in which viewers are encouraged to make believe the thoughts and feelings that were prompted by the scene of death.

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The Director's Cut and the Shortened Version I have already mentioned the existence of a director's cut and significantly edited version of Center Stage, and it is time now to examine the key differences, and their implications, more closely. We may usefully begin by noting that while many of the divergences amount to the excision of shots and scenes, some pertain to material included in both the longer and shorter film. The most striking example of this has to do with the use of colour to signal shifts among the three categories of images examined above. Given that the 148-minute director's cut was deemed lost, and thus unavailable, for many years, it is not surprising that the question of colour differentiation should be absent from the history of the film's critical and popular reception. Essentially the difference can be described as follows: the director's cut (referred to as A from now on and including both the 1991 and the 2005 releases) operates with a two-coded use of colour whereas the shorter, and apparently more market-friendly version (to be referred to as B) operates with three distinct colours. For the most part the convention governing the use of colour in A is as follows: interpretive reconstructions are presented in full colour; historical traces and documentary images are presented in black and white. In the case of B, blue is introduced to mark the existence of three distinct types of images: full colour is used for the interpretive reconstructions; black and white for the historical traces; and blue for the documentary images. Thus, for example, when Kwan reconstructs a situation in which the Lianhua group is photographed in connection with Bu Wancang's Three Modern Women (Sange Modeng Nuxing, aka Three Modern Girls, 1933), A fades from colour to black and white, making it easy for the inattentive viewer to believe that he or she is viewing an historical trace rather than a reconstruction. In B, on the other hand, the photo session begins in full colour and then fades to blue, and this

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marks the fact that what the viewer sees is a record of Kwan's actors as they engage in an imagined photo session, and not some image capturing the reality of the Lianhua group at a given moment in time. The consensus view among those few insiders who remain aware of the colour difference is that the producers strongly urged the introduction of some mechanism allowing viewers to keep track of the intricacies of Kwan's narrative, especially the shifts between two types of non-fiction. And Kwan confirms the accuracy of this view. There is one noteworthy departure from the two colour conventions just described, and this occurs during the opening moments of the film, in both A and B. During the framing of the story, in the sequence of images preceding the credit title, Cheung famously remarks on similarities between herself and Ruan in response to Kwan's statement about the legendary star's lack of serious roles prior to her move to Lianhua. Cheung's exchange with Kwan, who remains off-screen, is presented in full colour, whereas strict observance of the colour conventions would make the scene black-and-white in version A and blue in version B. What becomes clear, however, on closer inspection, is that Kwan intends the framing material to inscribe the entire film within the more general category of interpretive reconstruction. One might be led to believe that the colour-based conventions only get established after the credit title, but this would, in my view, be a mistake. The convention, rather, is operative from the first to the very last image. Indeed, the use of full colour in a scene with documentary import serves to underscore the extent to which the cinematic biography and documentary about Ruan Lingyu, as well as the record of Kwan's production, involve interpretation and a personal vision that can only be selective and never definitive and complete. The departure in advance from the conventions that are made manifest in a subsequent moment introduces the very reflexivity for which Kwan and Center Stage have received such praise.

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Many of the divergences between A and B have to do with excisions at the level of the documentary footage detailing the making of the film. Indeed, of the 26 minutes that separate the two versions, some 20 minutes or so pertain to the film's reflexive, documentary dimensions. In some instances longer scenes in A become significantly shorter in B, whereas in other cases scenes included in A are entirely omitted from B. The concluding moments of the film provide a clear example of the latter. In the shorter version the film draws to a close as Ruan Lingyu's daughter is shown asking Li Lili why she isn't crying, and repeating the question when she receives no response. A pan from left to right subsequently shows the griefstricken faces of the Lianhua directors. This shot is followed by the shot of the site of the former Lianhua studio and a final black-and-white funereal image of Ruan Lingyu. In the director's cut, however, these final shots are preceded by a significant amount of documentary footage, some of it quite moving. Kwan, for example, is shown requesting a retake of the shot that shows Maggie Cheung as the deceased Ruan Lingyu. Cheung, Kwan points out, breathed during the first take, and the viewer cannot help but notice just how long Cheung is required to hold her breath during the second take, and how relieved the actress is to hear the word 'cut' when Kwan finally utters it. Another clear example of wholesale omission is the scene documenting Kwan's interview with the director Sun Yu, accompanied by the Hong Kong director's account of the encounter. Kwan foregrounds the difficulties he experienced in communicating with Sun Yu as a result of the interviewee's advanced age and the suffering he endured during the years of the Cultural Revolution. Kwan explains the role of the photo album that Sun Yu is shown holding during the interview, the idea having been to jog the aged director's memory by means of visual stimuli. A note of sadness is introduced when Kwan recalls Sun Yu's death only a month after the interview.


Of equal interest is the removal of a lengthy sequence beginning with Stanley Kwan and Tony Leung Ka-fai watching rushes for the scene in which the Lianhua director Cai Chusheng and Ruan Lingyu begin to establish a relationship in anticipation of the shooting of New Woman (XinNuxing, 1934). Tony Leung Ka-fai asks Kwan to speculate about motivations and decisions that Center Stage will attribute to Cai Chusheng in its interpretive reconstructions. This exchange becomes the basis for an intervention on the part of Maggie Cheung, who blames Ruan Lingyu's death on Zhang Damin and Tang Jishan's philandering, but also on the missed opportunity for committed love between the actress and Cai Chusheng. Kwan's contribution to the emerging dialogue about the causes of Ruan's suicide focuses on public opinion and provides the occasion for serious reflection on the part of Cheung on the effects of gossip on her own life: For someone like myself who is also in the acting profession, gossip is truly a formidable thing. Gossip is as terrifying today as it was back then. An actor doesn't want everyone to be aware of her personal life. Also, the truth is distorted and it's impossible to clarify things. People take malicious pleasure in gossip. And when you hear about it, it really hurts. If what is said is true that means that somebody knows your secrets and you feel like you've been stripped naked ... It's painful. So I understand what Ruan must have felt like. Cheung's remarks are followed by a question from Kwan: 'When Ruan was confronted with these rumours, she killed herself. If you were to find yourself in a similar situation, would you kill yourself?' Cheung's response emphasizes the idea of different sensibilities and thus highlights for the viewer the extent to which the Ruan Lingyu role that she assumes in the various interpretive reconstructions involves bridging differences and not some gentle fusion based on kindred attitudes: 'My first reaction would be to express my position, something along the lines of "And so what?" If I'm hurt I certainly wouldn't want

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to give them the satisfaction of knowing this. As for taking my life on their account, absolutely not. If I have to die, 111 die, but it won't be because of them.' Scenes involving interpretive reconstructions of the Lianhua filmmaking milieu and of Ruan Lingyu's relations to colleagues are also shortened in, or entirely removed from, the B version, and in some cases the excisions have consequences for the meanings suggested by the narrative. Let us begin with the clearest example of a meaning-inflecting change. In B the scene combining the imagined shooting of Little Toys with clips from the actual film is preceded by an interpretive reconstruction of the making of Fei Mu's now lost film from 1933, City Nights {Chengshi Zhi Ye). Drenched by pouring rain, Cheung as Ruan is shown shaking a dead man lying in the street. Ruan looks up at the director, indicates that she has played the scene poorly and requests another take. An exchange between the Fei Mu character and his cameraman establishes that five takes, two of them good, have already been shot. In response to the cameraman's question about Ruan's strangely perturbed condition, Fei Mu explains that the actress' father died when she was six in circumstances resembling those of the scene being shot. Kwan has the cameraman say, 'You imitated the situation on purpose', to which Fei Mu reacts with a somewhat guilty expression. Marking a transition to the next take, the camera pans down one of the enormous monochrome backdrop paintings that are used throughout Center Stage to create a highly expressionistic Shanghai setting, before focusing on Cheung, whose re-enactment of the death scene now carries an intense emotional charge. The viewer easily recognizes the shift in acting quality, but Kwan also signals it through the Fei Mu character's slight change of expression, which clearly functions as an interpretive cue to imagine the legitimacy of imputing artistic value to Ruan's performance. Ruan, the viewer is invited to believe, has found the courage to find an acting resource in her own traumatic memories.

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There are many theories of and approaches to acting and it is not surprising that Kwan would wish to present hypotheses about Ruan Lingyu's preferred methods as an actress. The standard account of Ruan Lingyu's life and works insists on the absence of formal training and on a resulting need to draw on real-life experiences in order fully to animate various roles: Unlike Gong [Li] who knows how to project a mask of pain while remaining an uncomplicated modern middle-class girl, Ruan who started her film career as a teenager to avoid the abuse and humiliation of her situation as a maidservant's daughter - did not 'act', but really experienced the feelings she projected on screen [emphasis added]. Hence the unaffected emotional charge, poignancy and feistiness of her performance - unable to separate acting from reality, she was consumed by the tragic dimensions of her roles. (Berenice Reynaud: 25) As noted above, Kwan's use of excerpts from The Goddess'to evoke private interaction between Ruan and Tang Jishan suggests a hypothesis about the interpenetration of roles and real-world situations. In that particular case it was a matter of the fiction to some extent providing models for behaviour and relationships in everyday life. The City Nights sequence, on the other hand, inverts the causal chain and thereby begins to respond to a question that must needs be implicit throughout a biopic about a legendary film star: how, exactly, did she manage to act as expressively as she did? It is no accident that reference is made to Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938), co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre and influential theorist of 'method acting', in one of the many stairwell exchanges that characterize the interpretive reconstructions in Center Stage. The Lianhua studio, it would appear, took Stanislavski and his method very seriously indeed. Whereas a loosely Stanislavskian approach envisages an actor actually feeling role-related emotions as a result of recalling relevant

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personal experiences, the City Nights reconstruction presents a thesis that radicalizes basic Stanislavskian conceptions. It is appropriate here to speak of a hypothesized radicalization of Stanislavski's methods on account of the intentional simulation of personally traumatic scenes. It is one thing for an actor to believe that the actual experience of feelings of intense sadness will help her movingly and convincingly to act a given scene, and for her to decide as a result to recall certain incidents from her past that provoked such feelings. In this instance there need be no exact correspondence between the actions that are to be performed in front of the camera and the actions that are contemplated in an effort to prompt certain emotions. What is more, while there may be an element of manipulation involved in the stimulation of actual emotions, the process is in no wise morally suspect since it is selfgenerated and self-directed. That is, it is the actor herself who decides to manipulate herself into feeling the emotions that she wishes to feel, and it is she who selects the objects of meditation in a perfectly private manner that in all likelihood eschews the idea of correspondence. The situation is somewhat different, however, when the reflexive dimension of the manipulative process is attenuated by the introduction of a second agent who is intent somehow on creating deep-level correspondences between fictional and real-life traumas in the mind of some other person. Kwan shows the Fei Mu character seeking a certain emotional charge for City Lightsby knowingly devising traumatic scenes that recall Ruan's personal history, and the point is spelled out for us in the cameraman's comment and in the director's corresponding guilty look. Kwan does not, however, condemn Fei Mu. Indeed, the latter is portrayed as willing to settle for one of the five takes that have already been shot so that Ruan will be spared the grief of the additional take that she herself requests. What Kwan does do in this interpretive reconstruction is point to the risks that inevitably accompany the acting process, to the many fine lines that are easily

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and indeed constantly crossed as the feelings, memories, and sensibilities of actors are made the means of generating images that will move audiences. The risks of the acting profession vary from one context to another, depending, for example, on whether actors are on long-term contracts with a given studio or sign on, via agents, for a single production, on whether they are part of a small national film industry or a large one, on whether their sensibilities are well suited to the acting methods being used, on whether the acting profession is respected or easily associated with criminals or prostitutes, and so on. Kwan's City Lights reconstruction shows us the risks associated with a tightly knit group where intimate involvement on a regular basis easily leads to respect and friendship, but also, potentially, to a misplaced and inappropriate desire to give more than anyone has the right to demand, or to the momentary exploitation of personal knowledge justified by the shared goal of artistic perfection. As we shall see, Kwan's representation of the Lianhua studio is mostly positive and certainly part of an attempt to articulate nonstrategic modes of interaction capable of countering the effects of hierarchy and authoritarianism. The inclusion/omission of the City Lights reconstruction in A and B respectively have a meaninginflecting dimension as a result, this being the only scene in which some of the potentially destabilizing implications of method acting in an intimate, ensemble-like studio arrangement are evoked. B, in short, presents a less nuanced interpretation of the professional social system that provided the context for Ruan Lingyu's performances than A does. As a result, A and B also provide quite different answers to questions concerning Ruan's reasons for taking her life. In B the emphasis is squarely on philandering lovers and gossip, whereas A brings the dynamics of acting in the context of a relatively stable and intimate team devoted to broadly Stanislavskian conceptions into the picture as a complicating factor. Other scenes omitted from B play primarily a meaningamplifying rather than meaning-inflecting role. One such scene

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takes place in a restaurant and focuses on witty exchanges between Cheung as Ruan and Tony Leung Ka-fai as Cai Chusheng. In the director's cut this playful restaurant scene contrasts clearly with a later restaurant scene in which Cai Chusheng more or less dismisses Ruan when she begs him to leave his mistress and wife and follow her to Hong Kong. The earlier scene that A includes and B omits serves to flesh out, and thus amplify, the otherwise largely implicit idea of some kind of romantic involvement between Ruan and Cai Chusheng. The playful restaurant scene also serves to unpack the many passing references to the parallels that were repeatedly drawn between Ruan and Marlene Dietrich and that would eventually become a central component of the Ruan Lingyu legend. In virtually any discussion of Ruan, scholarly or other, the speaker or writer ends up revisiting the topos of Ruan as the Garbo or Dietrich of China. Let us look at the dialogue in the scene and the way in which it draws on and further communicates this inescapable topos-. CAI (to RUAN): You're imitating Marlene Dietrich again. RUAN: Am I convincing? [They laugh] CAI : It seems like Marlene Dietrich was condemned to play the role of a decadent woman. Your style is much more wholesome. I can't imagine what she would have been like in a role as devoted mother, virtuous wife, factory worker, or oppressed woman. Why do they all say you resemble her? RUAN: I'll tell you why. Because I play the role of suffering woman in a sensual manner. CAI: Don't you dare be sensual in your role as a new woman. RUAN: Fei Mu makes fun of me because I add sensuousness to the role of a nun. CAI: Fei Mu is too bourgeois. Don't compare me with him. [Cut to the interpretive reconstruction of Fei Mu's A Sea of Fragrant Snow {Xiang Xue Hai, 1934)1-


A fictional exchange about roles, attitudes, similarities, and differences becomes a mechanism in this instance for clearly articulating the taken-for-granted wisdom of legendary discourse that is merely implied in the many quick references elsewhere in the film to von Sternberg's Blue Angel. One last difference between A and B deserves mention in connection with the idea of meaning-amplification: the imagined scene in the Lianhua studio where the directors and actors are shown engaged in song when Cheung as Ruan returns to work after a stay in Hong Kong. In the longer scene the director Nieh Er leads the singing, whereas the edited scene cuts to a later moment when Li Lili initiates the singing. The director's cut shows Sun Yu expressing a desire to make a film that would pick up on the elements by which Nieh Er is inspired, and this project is enthusiastically embraced by the group as Lianhua's first progressive film. Ideas are bounced around, including that of using the name Tien Han in the envisaged film. This particular proposal prompts an interjection from Bu Wancang, his point being that an actually existing person, currently underground, would be endangered if this name were to be used. In this case the images and exchanges that figure in the director's cut explicitly construe the Lianhua group as a progressive force warranting admiration.

Artifice, Reflexivity, and Doubt: Center Stage the Question of Knowledge

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Timing is everything when it comes to ideas and culture, and there can be no doubt that Kwan's Center Stage enjoys canonical status today because it was perceived as somehow timely when it was first released. This timeliness has to do with the way in which Center Stage appears to resonate with a number of conceptions of reality and knowledge that had become popular by the early 1990s as a

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result of the influence of various poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers. To be attuned to some of the most fashionable proposals at the time was to know that reality was essentially unknowable and that truth claims should be viewed with considerable scepticism and suspicion as a result. It is not difficult to see how Center Stage might be interpreted as an intelligent cinematic articulation of some of the relativisms and scepticisms to which poststructuralism and postmodernism, each in their own way, gave rise. With its fictional, non-fictional, and clearly selfreferential dimensions, Center Stage is easily construed as challenging apparently naive views of documentary filmmaking as essentially and ideally involving the communication of truths about historical (and other) realities. To viewers persuaded by sceptical doctrines, Center Stage readily becomes a sophisticated cinematic critique of the realist epistemologies that have played a central role over the years in theoretical accounts, but also in pre-theoretical understandings, of documentary filmmaking. Viewed in this light Center Stage becomes happily coincident with the sceptical turn in documentary theory that was one of the results of a general diffusion of the originally philosophical poststructuralist and postmodernist doctrines. As John Corner points out in The Art of Record: A Critical Lntroduction to Documentary, the deconstructive project was embraced by many a documentary theorist who came to see the non-fiction film's putative realism as a fiction that it was the task of rigorous thinking to explode: I t is the claim ... that a special relationship to the real is being achieved (indexical, evidential, revelatory) and, on the basis of this relationship, that "truths" are being communicated, which excites the energies of critique and refutation.... Documentary has seemed to be so bold and complacent in its epistemological assumptions and its devices of showing as to be, in itself, an offence to theory, an outrageous act of naivety' (10). Center Stage, it seemed to many, taught lessons that paralleled those of deconstructive theorizing

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about documentary filmmaking: the reality of Ruan Lingyu as a unique person with a distinct life story is ultimately unknowable and the search for truths about this historical figure can only be a fool's game. Yet, there is something deeply unsatisfying about the above line of reasoning, both as a view of the nature of non-fiction or documentary filmmaking and, more importantly for present purposes, as an account of Center Stage. Kwan's film, I believe, shows far greater affinity with the latest pragmatic developments in documentary theory than it does with the earlier sceptical tendencies. John Corner, who distanced himself from 'sceptical and pessimistic accounts of knowledge' (1996: 1) as early as 1996, begins by acknowledging the 'duality in documentary work — its character as both artifice and as evidence' (2) in order to chart a via media that avoids an implausible conflation of non-fiction filmmaking with wholly veridical representations of reality, on the one hand, and an equally wrongheaded reduction of such filmmaking to various strategies of 'deceit and fraud' (3) on the other. More recent challenges to the sceptical turn in documentary theorizing include Carl Plantinga's insightful study entitled Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film and Trevor Ponech's equally admirable What is Non-Fiction Cinema?. Drawing, among other things, on linguistics, analytic aesthetics, and philosophy of mind, these two books provide an important alternative to the sceptical epistemologies that Corner rejects. The kind of broadly pragmatic approach that theorists such as Plantinga and Ponech propose allows us clearly to identify the contribution that Center Stage makes as an innovative instance of documentary filmmaking. Contrary to received wisdom, this contribution, we shall see, has very little to do with pessimism or scepticism about epistemological matters. What, then, are some of the central tenets of the revisionist theories of documentary and non-fiction filmmaking that I have just evoked? Let us begin by looking at how the pragmatic approach

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responds to a key question: what distinguishes fiction from nonfiction filmmaking? Rejecting earlier proposals, the pragmatic theorists insist that the distinction has nothing to do with the presence or absence of artifice. That is, fiction and non-fiction filmmaking are both activities that involve subjective intervention, mediation, and creative manipulation of some kind. The pragmatic account also rejects a second established response to the fiction/ non-fiction conundrum, the idea that whereas non-fictional works somehow resemble actuality, fictional works do not. Another characteristic claim made by pragmatic thinkers is that careful attention to the intrinsic properties of works cannot in itself establish whether a given work is an instance of fiction or nonfiction. The fictional or non-fictional status of works is, then, a matter of background knowledge or contextual framings that provide indications of the makers' intentions and of the corresponding appropriate uptake on the part of viewers. Plantinga's concept of indexing is meant to capture this pragmatic solution to the fiction/non-fiction distinction.1 A work, that is, is 'indexed' as fiction or non-fiction by producers, distributors, exhibitors, directors, actors, reviewers, and any number of other agents who assume one of the many action roles that are associated with the production, distribution, and evaluation of film. Indexing arises as a result of a wide range of discourses and other sources of information: advertisements, interviews, reviews, and so on. The point of such indexing is to cue viewers' expectations and to encourage them to adopt a certain stance in relation to the work and its images. Drawing on the work of the analytic aesthetician Nicholas Wolterstorff, Plantinga construes as fictional those works that involve a 'Active stance' and as non-fictional those works that are accompanied by an 'assertive' stance (Plantinga 1997: 17). In the case of fiction, the invitation is to contemplate, consider, or imagine a state of affairs. Non-fiction, on the other hand, invites us to believe

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that the represented states of affairs 'occur in the actual worlds as portrayed' (17). The assertive stance invites belief, and in those cases where cinematic constatives (or assertions) are successfully expressed and appropriately received they provide what Ponech calls 'epistemic access to features of the world', 'epistemic access' being glossed as a process that results 'in somebody acquiring approximately true beliefs for which they have a degree of justification' (Ponech 1999: 247). To claim that non-fictional works are assertions (Plantinga) or constatives (Ponech) allowing for the acquisition of justified beliefs in some cases is not, however, to suggest that the relevant images refer only to actually existing situations, that they exactly imitate or resemble reality, or that they are devoid of artifice or manipulation. Non-fiction, after all, can be deceptive and based on attitudes that are manipulative and insincere. In what follows I wish to make a case for seeing Center Stage, not as a visually elaborate confirmation of the failure of any and all knowledge claims, but as an intelligent pursuit of a fallibilist epistemological project in which reflexivity, doubt, and uncertainty play an important role as justifications for beliefs that viewers are invited to acquire. I shall begin by looking at elements that might be, or have been, considered as providing a warrant for sceptical conclusions: the flamboyant theatricality of the set design; the camera's emphasis on details and refusal at key moments to provide establishing shots; and the paradoxical relation on occasion among interpretive reconstructions, historical traces and documentary images. The point will be to show that, far from undermining the idea of'epistemic access', these innovative features provide evidence of, or simply encourage a form of epistemological prudence that allows viewers to distinguish carefully among various kinds of propositions: those that may be rationally endorsed as approximately true beliefs, those that can only be entertained as provisional beliefs, and those lacking sufficient evidence to count

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as more than mere thoughts entertained for various purposes. Kwan's contribution, and it is a significant one, is to have recognized just how spurious it is to claim that the documentary must either meet the standards of exact correspondence and absolute truth or relinquish the pursuit of knowledge entirely. One of the things that makes Center Stage so unique is the willingness that it evidences to settle for the far more modest, but nonetheless exacting goal of the best possible available account. The philosophical or theoretical import of Center Stage has everything to do with fallibilism and nothing to do with scepticism. Mise-en-Scene A standard definition of mise-en-scene is the one provided by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in Film Art: An Lntroduction: 'all of the elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed: the settings and props, lighting, costumes and make-up, and figure behavior' (1997: 480). Center Stage is in many ways a highly theatrical film that eschews a naturalistic approach in key respects having to do with the mise-en-scene. Reference might be made in this connection to the quality of Cheung's acting, Kwan having insisted throughout that she create a certain distance between her role and herself qua actor by relying on what Bertolt Brecht called 'alienation effects' (1964). The point was not merely to retain an internal distance from the role, but to signal the distinction between actor and role to viewers, thereby blocking any temptation they might have to lose themselves so fully in the make believe of the reconstructive interpretations as momentarily to entertain thoughts of Cheung as genuinely Ruan. Rather than identify the many different ways in which a nonnaturalistic style determines the look and atmosphere of Center Stage, my preference is to focus on one particular aspect of the film's overall production design: the sets. The production designer

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for Center Stage was Piu Yau-muk, who had already worked with Kwan on Rouge {Yanzhi Kou, 1988) and would go on to provide the art design for Red Rose, White Rose {Hong Meigui, BaiMeigui, 1994) a few years after Center Stage. In conversation with JeanPierre Dionnet, Kwan recalls his initial research trip to Shanghai in 1990 and the changes that the city was undergoing at that time. In some instances old buildings were completely demolished, and in other cases exteriors were preserved and interiors gutted, the latter being a tendency, we might note in passing, that continues today. A decision was made early on to shoot everything on location and to build whatever sets might be needed, including the glass studio that became the setting for reconstructions of a number of Lianhua productions. Yet, where, in the wake of dramatic transformations, were the settings to be found that would provide backdrops reminiscent of old Shanghai? Reflecting on this issue Kwan concluded that what the film required was a series of contextproviding backdrops that would resonate with the look that his generation associated with old Shanghai. These images, he noted, were almost entirely mediated by old black and white Shanghainese films from the Golden Age of Chinese cinema, and the films in which they figured were typically shot, not on location, but in studios where ample use was made of painted backdrops. Large painted backdrops evoking Shanghai in a style reminiscent of early studio-produced films seemed, as a result, to provide a cogent and aesthetically interesting solution to the problem of settings that Shanghai's transformations initially entailed. The backdrop paintings are evident at many key moments in the film and are introduced from the beginning. Indeed, the first shot following the credit title involves a complex camera movement that begins with the camera directed at a window through which the attentive viewer discerns a large painted backdrop of Shanghaistyle buildings. This part of the shot lasts only a few seconds and it is easy to overlook the painterly nature of the background.

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The first image after the title credit establishes a sense of location by means of a painted backdrop glimpsed through the window.

Interestingly, the next significant shot of painted backdrops occurs in the context of an interpretive reconstruction that begins with Cheung as Ruan in her dressing room and concludes with clips from Bu Wancang's The Peach Girl{Taohua QiXueJi, 1931). A shot of Ruan's dressing room window, taken from the outside, shows reflections of stark black and white outlines of Shanghaistyle buildings, bolder and more expressionistic than those seen at the outset of and later on in the film, but similar nonetheless. The outlines are subsequently shown to be a part of an imagined Lianhua set and as such they effectively reference Kwan's general strategy. The viewer is essentially shown a simulation of the painted backdrops that become the model for the backdrops that serve to evoke the Shanghai setting of the interpretive reconstructions. The softer, greyer paintings that occur throughout are highly visible in a subsequent scene where Cheung as Ruan invites Bu Wancang to step outside onto a balcony so that she can ask him in private to let her play the role of Zhou in Three Modern Women {Sange

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Modeng Nuxing, 1933). Simple, grey-tone paintings of an imagined Shanghai skyline provide a striking and clearly non-naturalistic backdrop for a significant part of their exchange.

Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung) asks Bu Wancang to let her play the role of Zhou in Three Modern Women {Sange Modeng Nuxing, 1933). Painted backdrops of a Shanghaistyle skyline are very much in view.

The backdrops play an equally pronounced role in the scene in which Cheung as Ruan talks to Tony Leung as Cai Chusheng about his envisaged film, New Woman, about the suicide of Ai Xia on whose life the film to some extent will be based, and about the cultural and political significance of squatting as a typically Chinese posture. While the backdrops are more noticeable in some scenes than others, they are a recurrent feature of the film's design and style. Indeed, as Kwan remarks, painted backdrops were even installed outside the window and behind the balcony of Ruan and Tang's apartment, so as to ensure consistency in the imaging of old Shanghai.

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Cai Chusheng (Tony Leung Ka-fai) squats while condemning the posture as a symptom of feudal mentalities.

The painted sets of Kwan's Lianhua Studio are mirrored in the window of Ruan Lingyu's dressing room.

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Painted backdrops are evident in this shot, which shows Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung) arriving at the Lianhua Studio.

In the history of cinema painted backdrops are typically associated with German Expressionism and especially with the canonical film in this style, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary {Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920). The use of nonnaturalistic backdrops aligns Center Stage with a tradition of fiction filmmaking, and, within that tradition, with a style that emphasizes artifice, theatricality, and the role of subjectivity in the perception and understanding of the world. What are the implications of this insistence on artifice in Center Stage? While the backdrops figure in the interpretive reconstructions that draw on the conventions of the biopic rather than the non-fiction film, the theatrical elements are typically read as undermining naive conceptions of documentary filmmaking and the access that some have taken it to provide to history, reality, and knowledge. If the starting premise when watching Center Stage is that documentary filmmaking tends to involve an impossible, and perhaps even ideologically suspect, commitment to reproducing the real, then the use of strikingly

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artificial elements is easily read as a means of correcting certain wrongheaded conceptions about the non-fiction film. The element of theatricality and even self-reference becomes a welcome message capable of alerting naive viewers to some of the reasons why documentary filmmaking is doomed to fall short of the standards of realism and of truth-as-correspondence with which it is widely associated. What makes Center Stage admirable following this sceptical line of argumentation is the way in which it makes an open admission of failure the basis for a change in perspective that effectively celebrates the inevitable: the artifice and subjective mediation that would be ineliminable elements in any documentary film. The theatricality and reflexivity of Center Stage appear in a rather different light, however, if the starting assumptions guiding the interpretive process are changed. That is, if documentary filmmaking is defined along the lines of the pragmatic conceptions identified above, then these properties are by no means obstacles to the realization of properly documentary intentions. Theatricality and artifice can figure equally in fiction filmmaking (where the intention is to get viewers to make believe certain states of affairs) and non-fiction filmmaking (where the goal is to get viewers to believe assertions about represented situations). Further analysis of Kwan's cinematic approach will serve to show that theatricality, reflexivity, and other related properties and attitudes in fact support a project oriented by the idea that there is a fact of the matter that to some extent can be accessed by intelligent and innovative documentary filmmaking.

Camerawork The term camerawork encompasses many different phenomena: the angles of shots, distinctions among types of shots differentiated by relative distance between the camera and the profilmic scene, the duration of takes, the way in which the profilmic material is framed,


the use of special filters and lenses, and so on. The many different uses to which various cameras can be put provide filmmakers with important tools for prompting cognitive processes that encourage meaning-making on the part of viewers. There are competing views on how these processes arise and what they entail, with some emphasizing a certain 'ecological' continuity between the perception of cinematic images and everyday perception and others the largely arbitrary and constructed nature of cinematic images and their correspondingly cultural effects. David Bordwell's attempt to find a middle ground between what he calls 'sheer naturalism' and 'radical conventionalism' (Bordwell 1996: 93) seems sensible. In Bordwell's approach cinematic techniques fall on a spectrum ranging from those that to a significant degree rely on the quasi-natural or contingent universals of h u m a n experience to those that are highly conventionalized. Whereas the techniques linked to contingent universals are largely accessible across cultures, the intelligibility of the more conventionalized forms of cinematic representation and meaning-making depend on various forms of cultural learning. I am interested in the present context in camerawork that somehow mimics the dynamics of everyday perception in order to underscore some of the epistemological difficulties that arise in connection with a film such as Center Stage. Let us begin with the opening moments of the film, in which Kwan shows us stills from Ruan Lingyu's pre-Lianhua films (the focus here is on the director's cut, which includes more stills than the edited film does). In the first two stills, Ruan is centrally positioned in the image, but not alone, whereas in the third still she is both at the center of the image and alone. As viewers watch these images, Kwan's voiceover commentary identifies Ruan Lingyu as the focus for his film. Having established this focus, Kwan then introduces a somewhat different way of presenting the historical stills. Instead of immediately revealing the entire still, Kwan directs the camera towards the periphery of the image, towards some less central figure

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or detail, before creating a searching movement that has the camera finally settle on Ruan Lingyu. In one case the camera begins with the feet of a couple dancing, following the bodies upwards until we see the faces of the dancers, one of whom is Ruan Lingyu.

A still is explored in a searching manner that begins by focusing on peripheral details.

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As the bodies are explored bit by bit in a tilt, the identity of the female figure is disclosed as the star Ruan Lingyu.


In another case, the camera focuses on the face of a child on the left, moving upwards to find the face of a woman, and then downwards to the right, where, having located Ruan Lingyu, it holds her image for a moment.

Kwan's searching camera explores a still from one of Ruan Lingyu's early films.

Moving across the still, the camera continues beyond the second figure.

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Having begun on the periphery, the camera finally locates Ruan Lingyu. It is, of course, possible simply to explain the alternation between a static and moving camera in terms of a formal or aesthetic commitment to some principle of variation. At the same time, the insistence on an almost hesitant camera that must search through cinematic space before locating the object of its interest has clear elements of the meta-cinematic. If the camera is held to signal the predicament of the director and viewers, then the point would seem to be that Ruan and her story are readily accessible in only some respects. In many cases a settled view is achieved only after false starts on the periphery and a good deal of tentative searching. Kwan's presentation of the stills from Ruan Lingyu's early films identifies a visual strategy that recurs throughout the film. This strategy gives priority to fluid camera movements, to context-asperipheral-detail rather than as perspicuous overview, and to a perspective that is so carefully attuned to detail that a sense of uncertainty, and thus of exploration, results. Let us look at three key moments in the film. The first is the opening scene in the

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Shanghai bathhouse which serves to establish the vision and ambitions of the newly founded Lianhua studio and the role that its directors envisaged for Ruan Lingyu. The camera focuses briefly on painted Shanghai-style buildings glimpsed through a window before moving downwards and then into the bathhouse in a fluid movement that initially reveals various naked bodies and body parts and subsequently the Lianhua directors in conversation. While the image of the painted backdrop serves to anchor the film's story world in a certain kind of location, the visual information that it provides is minimal and certainly far less than that of the traditional establishing shot. In this case context-as-peripheral-detail serves to create a sense of coming in from the outside without a clear idea of where to look, a sense of almost having to feel one's way through a milieu in order to bring into focus elements that might be centrally relevant to the quest for knowledge about Ruan Lingyu and her tragic stardom. The exploratory stance is clearly linked in this instance to the camera's fluid movements and to its apparently excessive attention to the details, among other things, of an ongoing pedicure. It is no doubt true that the focus on various male body parts reflects Kwan's identity as a gay filmmaker, but it is also important to acknowledge the role that a certain 'detail without perspective' plays in establishing tentativeness rather than certainty as the guiding framework for Kwan's biopic. The next scene provides another clear example of Kwan's approach. We begin, once again, with the image of a painted backdrop, but in this case the camera is so closely attuned to its details that the viewer has no way of knowing what it is that he or she is observing (see p.75, top). The backdrop-as-backdrop only becomes accessible once the camera pulls back to reveal a glass structure, filmed from above, that will later become identifiable as Kwan's reconstruction of the Lianhua studio. The glass provides intriguing access through its transparency to visual data that cannot be entirely discerned or properly processed, distance rather than

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The viewer is introduced to a sequence focusing on the Lianhua studio by means of a highly stylized painted backdrop of the kind that Kwan associates with the Golden Age of Chinese cinema. The framing of the backdrop deprives the viewer of contextual information allowing it to register as anything other than a striking image.

The first image of Kwan's Lianhua studio is designed to intrigue through partly obscure visual detail.

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proximity being the problem in this instance (see p.75, bottom). Once again a fluid camera movement carries the viewer into the space below where, it turns out, Maggie Cheung is being filmed in a reconstruction of Sun Yu's Memories of the Old Capital (1930). The visual dynamics of the sequence suggest that the kind of perspective that allows for understanding is something that is arrived at through exploration rather than given in advance in connection with the certainties of a settled view or position. The insistence, through visual style, on a perspective that makes the object that is viewed unintelligible at first is also apparent at later moments in the film. Thus, for example, the opening images of the first dance hall sequence involve the camera focusing on an intricate art-deco-style design that registers only and minimally as such, as a design with features reminiscent of a certain period in the history of the decorative arts. As the camera moves downwards and draws back the design becomes legible as the elaborate ceiling of a dance hall, allowing the viewer to identify the accompanying music as diegetic and emanating from a band.

Kwan's stylistic emphasis on detail is evident in this first shot from a dance hall sequence.

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As the camera tilts downwards and pulls back the viewer gains a sense of spatial orientation.

The receding camera finally generates an image that would have qualified as an establishing shot had it been presented at the beginning of the image sequence.

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The now visible space of the dance hall is then explored, once again in a fluid movement, until the camera finds what it is looking for: Li Minwei in conversation with colleagues about acting and actresses in Shanghai. While critics have overlooked the tentative and exploratory dimensions of Kwan's visual style, it is clear that the features identified above could easily be accommodated by interpretations of Center Stage that emphasize the impossibility of valid knowledge claims and the film's reflexive endorsement of scepticism. In my view, however, this kind of assimilation of uncertainty with scepticism cannot be made to mesh convincingly with other features of Kwan's film. As we shall see, a more plausible interpretation of the persistent gravitation towards a certain visual style links uncertainty with the virtues of epistemologically motivated doubt and prudence, virtues that are central to the 'best available account' approach that Kwan ultimately supports and pursues.

Editing and

Framing

Readings of Center Stage as an innovative biopic that teaches viewers to doubt the epistemological self-confidence of traditional types of cinematic biography typically dwell on the segment towards the end of the film that concerns the filming of Cai Chusheng's New Woman. What is interesting about this segment is the way in which framing combines with other factors to create confusion about the status of certain images. More specifically, images that viewers cannot help but classify as interpretive reconstructions turn out, as a result of a shift in framing, to be part of the documentary record of filming Center Stage, just as images that appear to be historical traces turn out to be part of Kwan's interpretive reconstruction of the scandal that Cai Chusheng's New Woman provoked. Let us first look at the interpretive reconstruction that mutates into an element in Kwan's documentary record. The scene begins with Tony Leung as Cai

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explaining how he would like Maggie Cheung to act during the death bed scene in which Ruan shouts 'I want to retaliate. Help me. I want to live. I want to live. I want to live.' The Leung character indicates that the utterances will figure as bold title cards accompanying the Ruan character's tragic face. All of this is shot in full colour and the viewer, relying on the tacit contract that has been established in the course of the film, classifies the scene as an interpretive reconstruction without further reflection. The viewer expects the interpretive reconstruction to conclude when Leung as Cai shouts cut and is surprised to note that Cheung remains in the hospital bed where she lies weeping as melancholic music plays on the soundtrack. The suggestion, within the framework of interpretive reconstruction with which the viewer continues to operate, is that Ruan had difficulty keeping her on- and off-screen lives separate. At this point, however, the colour of the image begins to shift as a lateral tracking shot films the bed and then gives way to an 'elegant crane shot that pulls back to a high angle view of the Hong Kong crew filming the scene' (Stringer 1997: 35).

The viewer observes what looks like Cheung playing Ruan Lingyu weeping.

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As the camera pulls back and the image changes to black and white in the director's cut, the suggestion is that Cheung is weeping as Cheung. The shift in framing and colour prompts viewers to ask themselves whether the images that they took to be of Cheung weeping as Ruan in an interpretive reconstruction of the filming of New Woman in fact are of the off-screen Cheung crying as a result of the emotional intensity of her role in Center Stage. The sceptical lesson that Kwan could be read as teaching in this segment is that images are deceptive: the disclosure of a larger context through a more inclusive framing can always unsettle the conclusions derived from apparently self-evident visual input. The New Woman segment continues with an excerpt from the original Cai Chusheng film that shows Ruan during the death scene with which the viewer is now somewhat familiar as a result of Kwan's reconstruction. Coming immediately after the ambiguous interpretive reconstruction with documentary components and filling the screen completely without any form of additional framing, these images appear quite simply as the historical traces that

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provide the starting point, as well as a point of comparison, for Cheung's efforts. Once again, however, the interpretation prompted by the images and their initial framing requires revision as a larger context and quite different framing are introduced. The camera pulls away from the black-and-white images and viewers suddenly find themselves back in the colour-coded world of interpretive reconstructions. It quickly becomes apparent that the viewer is to see the sequence from Cai Chusheng's New Woman as part of a screening, observed by the Ruan and Cai characters, within the context of an interpretive reconstruction of the scandal to which the film gave rise when it was first shown in Shanghai. As contemporary Hong Kong actors playing Shanghainese journalists from the 1930s storm out of the screening room with various parting condemnations of the original film, Leung as Cai turns to Cheung as Ruan, praising her gently and seductively for her great talent as an actress. Historical traces, we now realize can be mobilized and framed in such a way that they become something quite different — an interpretive reconstruction — while remaining essentially unchanged. Images, it becomes clear yet again, can be deceptive. But what exactly are we to make of this point? Does the message that is carefully underscored by Kwan on two separate occasions within a single segment allow us to conclude that this filmmaker rejects the idea of historical knowledge and sees all claims about the past as so many instances of manipulation, fabrication, and deception? Kwan and his film have a lot more to contribute to wider debates, and thus become more interesting, once we realize that there is compelling evidence to suggest that the answer to this question is no. Far from supporting the pervasive and at times almost standardized scepticisms of a postEnlightenment era, Kwan provides a cinematic articulation of the effort and discipline that figure centrally within a modest epistemology of the best available, rather than wholly true account of the past.

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Kwan's Commitment

to the Best Available

Account

Kwan's 'best available account' of the past rests on two basic assumptions: 1.

There is a mind-independent reality that constitutes a fact of the matter about which we can make more or less accurate claims. 2. The accuracy of our claims about a given reality, and especially about historical realities from which we are distanced in a myriad of ways, depends to a considerable extent on our disciplined abidance by certain procedures. These procedures or maxims are essentially those of the researcher who operates within a broadly realist and empirical framework: a. If those who experienced the phenomenon in which we are interested remain alive, then these people must be heard. Their stories may be distorted and lacunary, but ethical as well as epistemological considerations dictate that they cannot be ignored. b. A monologic stance is less likely than a dialogic stance to produce approximately accurate beliefs. A fair-minded dialogue with critical thinkers makes possible not only the dissemination but also the further refinement of knowledge claims. c. Apparently self-evident data can be deceptive and must be carefully scrutinized with an eye to other, and possibly more accurate, contextualizations. d. A narrative about the past will always encompass a number of quite different claims. Some of the claims will be made on the basis of what the researcher takes to be sufficient evidence and will thus be presented with a certain degree of certainty and conviction. Other claims take the form of provisional or hypothetical beliefs supported by some, but not yet sufficient evidence. In the context of humanistic research or research-driven storytelling, we can also

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discern a third type of claim which has only a minimalist or largely speculative connection to the past in which we are interested. The relative accuracy of one's account of the past depends to a significant degree on the extent to which one distinguishes carefully among the different kinds of claims that can be made about the past. The best available account emerges, not when speculative reconstructions are eliminated, but when agents have a clear sense of which aspects of the overall narrative are supported by sufficient evidence, partial evidence, and entirely insufficient evidence.

I drew attention, in the section on historical traces, to Kwan's insistence on the need to distinguish carefully among various kinds of claims. At this point I want to highlight a number of scenes in which Kwan and his team manifestly adopt the attentive stance of the scrupulous researcher. These scenes are particularly important, for in addition to identifying the guiding principles of what I have been calling the 'best available account' approach to the past, they provide a larger context for understanding some of the apparently sceptical gestures for which Center Stage has been praised. I shall be drawing on the director's cut here as it includes more of the relevant material than the edited version. The scenes that I have in mind are all part of the metacinematic documentary record that provides information about the making of Center Stage. The first example of what I want to call manifest attentivenessm connection with research occurs in a scene in which Kwan shares a videotaped interview with Li Lili at the age of 76 with his crew. The scene opens with the image of Li Lili on a monitor and a good deal of banter with Carina Lau, who plays the role of the Shanghainese actress. After interventions from a couple of the other actors, attention shifts to the monitor and we hear Li

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Lili talking about how she remembers not being able to cry when Ruan lay dead before her, and how she fixed some stray hair as a parting gesture.

Kwan shares an interview with Li Lili with his cast.

At this stage, the camera draws the viewer's eye to Carina Lau, who sits perfectly still as she concentrates intensely on Li Lili. The voice of Li Lili gives way to Kwan's voice-over, which notes that Li Lili and Ruan became friends during the shooting of Little Toys. Li Lili, Kwan remarks, claimed that Ruan had taught her how to act, and that she in turn had helped Ruan with her Mandarin. The second example of manifest attentiveness relates to Kwan's interview with Sun Yu. Once again, the interviewee is present in the room via a video monitor. Kwan comments on some of the strategies that he used to prompt Sun Yu's memory and then the camera shifts from Kwan to Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau. The composition and editing of the images resembles that from the earlier scene, with attention being directed first towards the image of the

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Carina Lau, who plays the role of Li Lili in Center Stage, observes Li Lili intently.

speaking subject on the monitor on the right and then towards the attentive listeners on the left. The image of the attentive listeners is allowed to persist long enough to make salient the intensity of the connection that they appear to feel with the interviewee. A third example of the attentive orientation towards the other with privileged first-hand knowledge of Ruan takes the form of an interview with the actress Chen Yanyan. In this case the videotaped interview that is shown to the Center Stage cast incorporates the attentive listener within its images. We see Maggie Cheung, once more on the left, in a room with Chen Yanyan, and as the camera seeks out the older actress's face we become privy to part of the interview. Chen Yanyan, more specifically, recalls a time when Ruan anticipated a rivalrous relationship with her and advised Sun Yu not to bring her to Shanghai. Tony Leung's subsequent question about Chen Yanyan's fame and Kwan's response suggest a detailed group discussion of the interview and its implications for the understanding of Ruan and her milieu.


Maggie Cheung manifests attentiveness in an interview with Chen Yanyan

Let us look at one last example of the attentive stance that becomes emblematic, in the course of the film, of Kwan's method and of that of his group. Kwan and Cheung interviewed the script writer Shen Ji in 1991, and in the director's cut two separate sequences are devoted to this interview. Shen Ji is queried, among other things, about the personal reasons that might have prompted Ruan to kill herself, and in the second sequence the camera insists on the role of the perfectly attentive listener. Cheung and Kwan are shown seated on the right, with Shen Ji on the left behind a desk. Once again, the image persists long enough for the viewer to note the body language of listening, the virtual immobility of complete attentiveness. The attentive stance that Kwan and Cheung make manifest is in every way at odds with the kind of attitudes that follow logically from a pessimistic or sceptical insistence on the impossibility of historical knowledge and understanding. Center Stage seeks a middle ground, which is also an ethical ground, between the hubris of both positivist and rationalist conceptions

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Shen Ji during an interview conducted by Stanley Kwan and Maggie Cheung.

Stanley Kwan and Maggie Cheung adopt the stance of the diligent researcher as they listen to Shen Ji.

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and the performative self-contradictions that the teachings of various types of scepticism inevitably generate when agents take them seriously and actually try to live by them. In Center Stage we find artifice and invention, deceptive framings and ambiguous images, but these elements are by no means at odds with the overall authorial purpose of the film, which is constative throughout. Center Stage asserts a number of things (some of them hypothetically, some of them as facts) about Ruan Lingyu, just as it makes claims about the intentions and practices that shaped the making of the film. The elements of artifice, invention, and deception serve not to undermine the very idea of documentary filmmaking oriented toward genuine understanding and the transmission of true beliefs, but to highlight the difficulties that one encounters as one pursues this idea through the depths, lacunae, and vagaries of historical time. The message is not that Ruan is unknowable, but that some aspects of Ruan and her history are more knowable than others. The picture can never be complete or wholly accurate. In some cases, however, we are better off with a partially accurate picture, than no picture at all, better off having assiduously tried to reach the past than not having tried at all. The story of Ruan Lingyu is one such case, and the final chapter attempts to explain why this is so.

3 Relevance and Meaning

Center Stage moves back and forth between a story world set in Shanghai in the 1930s and Hong Kong actors practising their craft in the 1990s, and many commentators have felt obliged to comment on the implications of the connections that seem to arise as a result. Inasmuch as the film was produced shortly after Tiananmen and at a time when fears about the handover were particularly intense in Hong Kong, critics typically interpret the links that Kwan traces between Shanghai and Hong Kong in terms of a cluster of largely negative emotions. A good example of this tendency can be found in Kristine Harris's excellent article on the so-called New Woman incident. This scandal was fuelled by the reception of Henrik Ibsen's Doll House in China and prompted by both Cai Chusheng's film (from which it takes its name) and Ruan Lingyu's suicide. Harris concludes her discussion of the New Woman incident by referring to Center Stage and a certain 'psychic' fit between the 'splendor and fear of 1930s semicolonial Shanghai on the eve of war' and the 'fin-de-siecle uncertainty accompanying the British colony's


imminent reunification with mainland China' (1997: 298). Harris's references to 'fear' and 'uncertainty' are characteristic of most attempts to make sense of Center Stage's dual focus and temporality. Yet, it is by no means clear that this insistence on a cluster of negative emotions does justice to the film or spells out its deeper cultural thrust with any significant degree of accuracy. What is overlooked as a result of the gravitation towards negative emotion is the extent to which Center Stage involves elements of the heritage film. It is important to see that the links that Kwan forges between Shanghai and Hong Kong reflect a contemporary use of the past for present purposes, an orientation towards the past as a kind of resource.1 This orientation is governed, not by negative emotion, but by a combination of admiration and gratitude that becomes a source of inspiration and thus of a modest and carefully delimited sense of hope. Comments by Kwan about his general outlook on life and the future of Hong Kong within a 'one country, two systems' framework suggest a certain resigned realism. His response to an interview question about his 'Hong Kong Trilogy' and the place of The Lsland Tales within it is revealing in this regard: T myself have adopted a takeit-easy attitude after 1997. At my age, I have come to terms with most things in life — whatever will be will be, you can't force things to happen. Now I'm more concerned about artists and funding' (Tsui 1999/2000, 70). Although resignation often goes hand in hand with cynicism or pessimism, there is no trace of either of these attitudes in Kwan. Instead we note the director's reasoned desire to focus his efforts and corresponding hopes on those activities and social spheres that he understands and has the capacity to inflect in a certain direction by virtue of talent, expertise, and experience. When the overarching system within which one finds oneself is inescapable and somewhat opaque, one can become mesmerized and even paralyzed by uncertainty in all its manifestations or one can simply accept uncertainty as a framework

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fact, as Kwan does. Center Stage reflects Kwan's stance, for it pays tribute to a group of remarkable film practitioners and artists who recognized the importance of carving out various spaces of artistic interaction that might be capable, within a broader context of crisis, upheaval, and instability, of making manifest a compelling social and political vision, including alternative ways of understanding the social bond. If we are to identify the cultural significance of Center Stage we must understand what is at stake in acknowledging the Golden Age of Chinese cinema as a kind of artistic and socially transformative gift that is available as a resource to all those who recognize its worth, be they Hong Kong persons, citizens of mainland China, or something else entirely. Center Stage highlights the value of this gift for Hong Kongers and effectively construes the Golden Age of Chinese cinema as a form of heritage culture that deserves to animate a larger Chinese community. Moving back and forth between images of an imagined Shanghai and Kwan's Hong Kong crew, the Hong Kong viewer of Center Stage is gently encouraged to reflect on what can be achieved in the face of formidable odds created by forces beyond the control of any given individual or group.

Heritage Culture In an interview conducted by Jean-Pierre Dionnet and included in the special features of the StudioCanal DVD release of the original director's cut of Center Stage, Kwan comments on the referential scope of his film as follows: I would love to say that Center Stage is a filmed reconstruction of the whole atmosphere of the Shanghai film industry in the 1930s. The film shows just how much I appreciate and admire

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directors like Fei Mu and Sun Yu and those great actors, not only Ruan Lingyu, but also Lily Li and Chen Yanyan. It is not a film that is particularly about Ruan Ling-yu. It's a film about film. There's a comparison between the 1930s and me and my film crew — the photographer and actors like Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau. We express our admiration, how much we admire or appreciate the filmmaking that went on in the 1930s. Kwan's admiration for the Golden Age of Chinese cinema also finds expression in the deeply personal film essay entitled Yang + Yin: Gender in the Chinese Cinema. Released in 1996 this film provides an authorial context for understanding Center Stage that is quite different from those suggested by the earlier Kwan films on which scholars necessarily relied in 1992. Yang + Yin, quite simply, puts the issue of heritage culture on the agenda as a legitimate focus for discussion in connection with Kwan and his work. Yang + Yin was commissioned by the British Film Institute in 1995 in order to celebrate the birth of cinema one hundred years earlier. The British Film Institute approached 18 directors from different parts of the world and invited each of them to make a 52minute-long film about their particular national cinema. Shu Kei was initially invited to reflect on Chinese cinema, but declined the project due to other commitments. The idea, Kwan remarked in an interview, was to provide an historical perspective on Chinese cinema that would also bespeak a deeply 'personal' engagement with this cinematic legacy. He indicated that as far as the BFI was concerned 'the film should not be a documentary, but a film about cinema made by a certain filmmaker' (Lai and Choi 1997: 42). Kwan's response to the emphasis on a personal dimension involves both thematic and formal elements. As the film's subtitle clearly suggests, the focus in Yang + Yin is on films that are remarkable on account of what they reveal about gender issues and, by extension, various conceptions of the social bond. The exploration of gender issues is made intensely personal through Kwan's voice


over meditations on his relation to his father and family more generally and by his interview-like conversation with his mother in the film's concluding moments. As is well known, Kwan's question to his mother about her response to his sexual orientation and relationship with 'William' was also the filmmaker's first public statement about his gay identity and sexual orientation. Yang + Yin is divided into six chapters and looks at older and more contemporary films from the Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland cinemas. The first and last of the chapters are entitled 'The Absence of Father (l)' and 'The Absence of Father (2)' respectively, and Kwan begins his film by recalling the intense sense of longing that he felt from the age of fourteen onwards as a result of his father's early death. In the second chapter, called 'Feminine and Masculine Face and Body,' Kwan shows clips from a number of his own films and speculates about some of his deeper psychological and family-related reasons for making so many films about women. Chapter 3, identified as 'Fathers are Everywhere', includes a discussion of Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels and interviews with Hou Hsiao Hsien, Ang Lee, Edward Yang, and Allen Fong about their relationships to their fathers. In chapter 4 the thematic focus is on 'Brothers', whereas 'Transvestites and Transsexuals' figure centrally in chapter 5. In the final chapter ('Absence of the Father (2)') Kwan provides a cultural and environmental perspective on his own gay identity. He begins by taking seriously the idea that a foetus registers the world outside the womb and goes on to note that his mother was a voracious consumer of Yam Kin-fai movies throughout her pregnancy. Yam Kin-fai, Kwan informs the viewer, played male roles throughout her career and lived with a female partner in real life, and these statements serve as the transition to Kwan's conversation with his mother about his own sexual orientation. In Yang + Yin Kwan devotes a considerable amount of attention to the films of Chang Cheh, especially their homoerotic features.


Born in Shanghai in 1923, Chang worked in Taiwan for a number of years before being hired by the Shaw brothers as one of their stable of contracted directors. Kwan includes a lengthy and gory scene of rectal penetration with a sword from The Slaughter in Xian (1990) in order to establish the relevance of Chang's work for his own chosen angle on Chinese film. The importance and extent of Chang's influence is evoked by means of clips from John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1987), on which Kwan asks both Chang and Woo to comment. Kwan goes on to recall the moment when the Beijing Film Archive decided to unlock its vaults and give viewers around the world precious access to the films that had been made in Shanghai during the 1930s. Reconstructing his initial reaction to some of these films, Kwan remembers being struck by powerful representations of male bonding and shows a scene from Wu Yonggang's Waves Wash the Sand (1936) in support of his observations. An interview with Peggy Chiao about some of the sexual undercurrents in Maxu Weibang's films, and especially in Song at Midnight (1937) and Song at Midnight (Part II, 1941), serves further to underscore the formal and thematic interest of the relevant period in Shanghainese film history. The next interview is with Leslie Cheung and concerns this actor's roles as a highly feminine man, most famously in Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine. Cheung's playful response is followed by a scene in which Kwan asks the Fifth Generation director to respond to the charge of homophobia that was levelled against him as a result of his decision to downplay the gay aspects of the novel on which his award winning film is based. The discussion of Farewell My Concubine provides the occasion for Kwan to reflect on the work of Xie Jin, a Shanghainese director whose Two Stage Sisters (Wutai Jiemei) in some ways anticipates Chen's film. Kwan's thematic approach allows him to move backwards and forwards in time and to ignore the kind of political and historical circumstances that are typically given weight in narratives about the three Chinese


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cinemas. The result is a powerful evocation of a kind of pan-Chinese film tradition, one marked by continuities, interactions, and influences rather than by distinctive national or sub-national identities and concerns. Kwan's insistence on resonances across borders and time provides a clue to the way in which heritage culture functions in Center Stage. If heritage culture is indeed created and managed 'for a range of contemporary purposes' as Brian Graham, G. J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge suggest (2000: 2), then what is the point of looking to the Golden Age of Chinese cinema? In a prehandover context defined by ambivalence, uncertainty, and a strong sense of cultural and political difference, the turn to Shanghainese film, particularly the Lianhua studio, is a future-oriented gesture that effectively defines a progressive moment in Chinese history as an important and possibly inspirational instance oi shared culture. As Graham et al have argued, heritage culture is often a highly dissonant phenomenon generating mutually exclusive claims to ownership (2000: 24). Kwan, quite clearly, is uninterested in the zero-sum characteristics that are emphasized in many contemporary mobilizations of the past, for the point is that the Golden Age of Chinese cinema is unthinkable without contributions originating both in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Center Stage is designed to stimulate a sense of cultural ownership on the part of Hong Kongers, but without giving rise to any of the dissonance that arises when the past is claimed in an exclusive way. Early Shanghainese film is genuinely a case of shared culture and there was much to be gained in Hong Kong in the 1990s from seeing it as a phenomenon capable of prompting an appropriate sense of 'We-ness.' But what, more precisely, is the connection between the Golden Age of Chinese cinema and Hong Kong? The short answer is: Li Minwei, who is played by Waise Lee Chi-hung in Kwan's film. Choi Kai-kwong's outstanding documentary {Xianggang dianying zhi

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fu Li Minwei, 2001) about Li Minwei quite rightly identifies this figure as 'the father of Hong Kong cinema' in its subtitle. Yet, the role of this Japanese-born and Hong Kong-educated cinephile extends well beyond Hong Kong. Li Minwei established the first Hong Kong film studio in Hong Kong (Minxin) in 1923, but subsequently extended his filmmaking initiatives to places such as Guangzhuo, Beijing, and Shanghai, where his efforts as a studio administrator contributed directly to the emergence of the Golden Age of Chinese cinema. Indeed, he was the co-founder, with Luo Mingyou, of United Service (Lianhua) with studios in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Sichuan. The Lianhua studio in Shanghai, we know, is the focus of Kwan's film from the start and the site where Ruan Lingyu's most important work was filmed and produced. The historical record remembers Li Minwei as a truly remarkable individual with diverse interests, multiple talents, and a crystal clear moral and political vision. Choi Kai-kwong uses the term 'total filmmaker' to capture Li Minwei's contributions as a scriptwriter, producer, actor, and cinematographer. Li Minwei directed and shot China's first narrative short film, Zuangzi tests his wife, and Hong Kong's first feature-length film, Rouge (1925). Li Minwei lived through some of the most tumultuous periods of modern Chinese history, including the overthrowing of the Qing dynasty, the establishment of the Republic, and the War of Resistance. He documented many of these moments on film, shooting newsreels about Sun Yat-sen's Northern Expedition that would later be edited into the film History (1941), the first documentary about the Chinese revolution. Li Minwei was the principal cinematographer for the Minxin-produced 35-mm silent film called The Battle of Shanghai (1937), which, as the title suggests, records Japanese militarism during the Resistance period. Li Minwei is remembered as a progressive figure who was opposed to the feudalism of the Qing dynasty, as well as to various forms of imperialism and colonialism. Drawing parallels between


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Sun Yat-sen, who was also educated in Hong Kong, and Li Minwei, Choi Kai-kwong identifies their encounter with positive and negative aspects of Western culture during the colonial period as a key factor in their largely shared vision for modern China, which revolved around concepts of 'democracy, freedom, and selfstrengthening through revolution and innovation' (liner notes). Although Li Minwei could easily have pursued a far more direct political path following the collapse of the Qing dynasty, his aversion for the power plays and intrigues of political life made a commitment to social transformation through innovative filmmaking a more appealing choice. Lianhua's many contributions include creating a link between the cinema and the revolutionaries of the 1920s, paving the 'way for the introduction of the left-wing cinema' (Jubin Hu, 2003: 2 4 25), and the production of films capable of appealing to educated Chinese spectators whose preferences previously had been for foreign films (154-5). According to the manager Luo Mingyou, the Lianhua Film Studio aimed to promote art, propagate culture, enlighten the common people, and save the Chinese film industry (52). And Ruan Lingyu is intimately associated with the left-wing cinema movement, having starred in some of the most famous of the left-wing classics: Three Modern Women, City Nights, Little Toys, and The Goddess (117). Yet, it is important to note that the relation between the Lianhua studio and the two main political forces in China in the 1930s was a complicated and deeply ambiguous one. Luo Mingyou made many films with a clear Confucian bent and was generally supportive of the Kuomintang and its particular brand of nationalism, as were many of the Lianhua shareholders. At the same time many of the Lianhua productions can be characterized as left wing films with clear leanings toward the teachings of the Communist Party. This tension between the philosophy and political vision of the 'managers', on the one hand, and the commitments of the people who actually

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created the films, on the other, is absolutely crucial in the present context, which seeks to understand the dynamics of heritage culture as a resource. In Kwan's account Li Minwei and Luo Mingyou emerge as very different figures with significantly divergent political inclinations. Unlike Luo Mingyou, the Hong Kong educated Li Minwei is consistently represented as the powerfully placed individual who is willing to compromise, to take risks and even to some extent to break with the managerial line so as to create sites of opportunity for film practitioners with leftist leanings. This point is made in a very important scene fairly early on in the film. Let us look at this scene in some detail. The scene begins with an image of film practitioners relaxing with a ball game on the Lianhua set and then cuts to Maggie Cheung as Ruan Lingyu at her make-up table and in conversation with the younger actress Chen Yanyan. Ruan Lingyu looks out of the window after a while and notices a certain commotion on the set. We then find ourselves on the set, where Nieh Erh, a musician and composer, calls over two of his colleagues, Yungkang and Liuchiung, in order to introduce them to some representatives from the student union at Fudan University. The students, it turns out, are preparing to protest against the Japanese annexation of Manchuria in 1931 in the so-called September 18th incident, and are hoping for support from the progressive members of the Lianhua studio. Yungkang and Liuchiung express a desire to join Nieh Erh and the students and appeal to Li Minwei as a former revolutionary for wider Lianhua support. Li Minwei indicates that he is willing to take up arms if necessary, but goes on to point out that in his view the time is not yet ripe for anything resembling violent resistance. At this point there is a striking cut from the studio floor to a balcony above where three rather ominous middle-aged men observe the scene below. As the camera tilts downwards in a way that clearly underscores the power that comes with surveillance the men mock what they regard as the wrongheaded political enthusiasm on show


Members of the Kuomintang-oriented Lianhua board mock the intention on the part of students, directors, and actors to demonstrate against Japanese imperialism.

Lin Chuchu (Cecilia Yip Tung) proposes a compromise to the strategic problem caused by Japanese imperialism on the one hand and a board sympathetic to the Kuomintang on the other.

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below and conclude that nobody will have the courage to fight the Japanese. It is Lin Chuchu, one of Li Minwei's wives, who steps in and proposes a compromise that is accepted by the group, and by her husband. The studio will continue filming, but a number of film practitioners will be released from their duties so that they can support the efforts of Nieh Erh and the students. 2 This scene draws attention to the realities of progressive thinking under circumstances that are largely controlled by figures and forces that promote a quite different set of interests. The progressive stance is associated with courage, flexibility, resilience, and firm commitment, and it is the discovery of these traits in the Lianhua filmmaking milieu that makes Ruan Lingyu and her colleagues (especially Li Minwei) a form of positive heritage culture in a post-Tiananmen, pre-handover Hong Kong context.

Against Gossip: On Hierarchy and Egalitarianism While Center Stage includes an excerpt from an interview with Maggie Cheung that points to gossip as an ineliminable feature of stardom, there can be no doubt that Kwan is interested in exploring the idea that there is a cultural specificity to gossip, with some social and political systems providing a more fertile terrain for the practice than others. Center Stage develops a systematic contrast between two radically different approaches to the social, the point being to make manifest the pathologies of the one and the promise of the other. Hierarchy, social and institutional opacity, and an instrumental power-oriented stance towards the other are all shown to fuel pernicious gossip driven by the dynamics of scapegoating, to claim sacrifices that can only be described as tragic. The antidote to these various pathologies is a social system inspired by mutuality, trust


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and respect, by a commitment to the kind of social bond that Kwan discovers in the milieu of the Lianhua studio. Yet, this alternative conception need not be a highly localized thing of the past, and Kwan goes to great lengths to show that his own artistic practice is oriented towards precisely the kind of ideals by which the Lianhua community was inspired. In a local Hong Kong context, Center Stage essentially documents the possibility of remaining true to norms of friendship, trust, mutuality, and generosity, even within a highly instrumentalized system of mainstream commercial filmmaking, a system that is imbricated with Triad activities and caught up with the uncertainties and opacities of Hong Kong's political and institutional future. At a higher level of abstraction, Center Stage can be seen as articulating a general communicative model that provides an antidote to the poison of pernicious gossip and an alternative to the dysfunctional social systems of which it is a symptom. Let us begin by looking at Kwan's take on the gossip phenomenon that is so often cited as one of the principal causes of Ruan Lingyu's death. There are, of course, many competing theories of gossip, and only some of these begin with the assumption that the term 'gossip' refers to largely negative and destructive social processes. In Good Gossip (eds Goodman and Ze'Ev, 1994), for example, gossip is examined closely by a number of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, the aim being to pinpoint some of its overlooked virtues. Gossip is shown, among other things, to contribute to social cohesion, to help people understand their problems, and to serve as a mechanism for coping with certain power differentials. In When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, Bernard Capp similarly takes issue with predominantly negative conceptions of gossip. In this case the focus is on the moral and practical support that marginalized groups can derive from gossip under certain very specific socio-historical conditions. If we were to imagine a


spectrum of views on gossip, ranging from the highly negative to the largely positive, there would be little doubt about where to situate Kwan. Kwan's Center Stage is a far-reaching condemnation of gossip, not just as a symptom of very particular socio-historical arrangements, but more generally. Kwan's cinematic inquiry into the causes of Ruan Lingyu's death effectively defines gossip as a runaway phenomenon characterized by scapegoat mechanisms and some combination of a vicious and lazy disregard for truth or the fact of the matter. What is more, as an emergent process traceable to no one single individual, gossip is shown to wreak its violence unchecked and unpunished. Concepts of blame and responsibility, it would seem, have little or no purchase on this diffuse and irreducibly social reality. Yet, if no one individual can be held responsible for the destruction of a life by gossip, then gossip itself can be condemned, along with the social conditions that prompt and to some extent normalize it. Center Stage, I have suggested, construes Ruan Lingyu and the Lianhua filmmaking milieu as an inspirational heritage resource for contemporary viewers by systematically aligning them with progressive values and attitudes. This progressive stance, we saw, finds expression in relation to concrete political events, such as the Japanese presence in China, but it also manifests itself in terms of a refusal of gossip. Let me provide two telling examples. The first occurs very early on in the film. Maggie Cheung as Ruan Lingyu is shown lost in thought and writing at her desk. She is joined by Lin Chuchu (Cecilia Yip Tung) and the two discuss childbirth at some length, including Ruan's intuition that a mother will feel more intense love for a child to whom she has given birth than for an adopted child. The sense of intimacy and friendship is powerful, and Lin Chuchu shifts the conversation to a quite different personal issue. More specifically, Lin Chuchu asks about Ruan's relationship to Zhang Damin and introduces the theme of gossip: 'Word has it,' she says, 'that you became intimate when your mother worked for


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his family.' This simple statement is in every respect the antithesis of gossip. Instead of taking circulating rumours at face value, Lin Chuchu approaches the person who functions as their putative referent and asks her to confirm or disconfirm the relevant propositional content. The value of the gesture is underscored by Ruan's response which involves gently rejecting the rumours as false: 'we knew each other then, but became intimate later.' Thinking once again about Ruan as a focalizer for critical talk, Lin Chuchu asks whether Ruan and Zhang Damin ever considered marriage and is told that the subject was never revived after the young man's parents objected to the idea.

Lin Chuchu (Cecilia Yip Tung) gently asks Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung) to confirm or disconfirm the truth of certain rumours about her person.

A second example of Kwan's alignment of the Lianhua milieu with a rejection of gossip occurs in a scene in which Cai Chusheng and Ruan discuss the suicide of the young Shanghainese actress, Ai Xia in 1934. At this point in the biopic, Cai Chusheng is preparing

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to shoot New Woman, a film based on the life and death of Ai Xia with whom he appears to have been romantically involved. His exchanges with Ruan, who is to play the leading role, make it clear that his film is driven by indignation, and especially by a desire to identify vile gossip as the real cause of Ai Xia's death. Kwan implicitly links the gossip, to which Ai Xia and, by extension, Ruan Lingyu were subjected, to a pre-Revolutionary feudal mentality. He has Cai Chusheng's anger at Ai Xia's death further encompass a Chinese habit of squatting, and especially its social and political implications: 'Two thirds of the Chinese population have become accustomed to assuming this posture. It's not that they like it, but they just can't help themselves. They squat as they wait for the mandarins, their landowners. They squat as they wait to be insulted, as they wait for salvation.' Ruan's response offers a less insidious reason for squatting: 'Or they squat in order to rest.' Cai Chusheng asks Ruan when she stopped squatting, thereby identifying her as someone who has taken a certain distance from the feudal mentalities that persist even in the wake of revolutionary activity and the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Ruan's response, not surprisingly, points to the dynamics of stardom as a mechanism for release from dominant arrangements: 'When I became a star.' Yet, she does go on to squat, the posture highlighting in this instance a certain solidarity with the working class and a sense of camaraderie with Cai Chusheng. The suggestion in Center Stage that feudal arrangements provide fertile ground for gossip is one that reflects the beliefs of some of Ruan's most influential contemporaries. Many intellectuals responded to Ruan's suicide by making public statements that drew attention to gossip as symptomatic of the persistence of feudal mentalities in a republican era: Thus, for example, the left-wing essayist Nie Gannu claimed that 'The one who killed Ruan Lingyu was not herself. The murderer was not an individual person like Zhang Damin or Tang Jishan. The killer is the residual feudal


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morality that still infatuates our minds.' The film critic Chen Wu similarly insisted that 'The sole cause of Ruan Lingyu's suicide is the remaining feudal power. The representatives of feudalism in this case are the irresponsible reporters, Zhang Damin, Tang Jishan, and Ruan Lingyu's own mentality.' Fei Mu, one of the left-wing directors, drew the same conclusion: 'It is the feudal residual in our society that killed Ms Ruan.' Feudalism, we note, is also a central element in Li Minwei's understanding of the causes leading to Ruan's death: Ms Ruan had seen all the brutalities of social injustice, particularly those related to the inferiority of women. Women can never elevate their positions in this semi-feudal society, and Ruan Lingyu felt powerless to redeem herself and tens of thousands of other suffering women from this injustice. Therefore, on March 8th, the International Woman's Day, she ended her own life. Protesting with her dead body, she demands justice from us all. (All cited in Laikwan Pang 2002, 124) But how exactly are we to understand the recurrent idea that feudalism generates gossip? In developing a response to this question it is helpful to focus on the changing nature of the social bond in the years following the 1911 revolution, as well as on the dynamics of talk within hierarchical societies more generally. Let us begin with the first issue. During the Qing dynasty, Chinese society was organized in terms of three bonds (between ruler and subject, father and son, and husband and wife) and five relationships (between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, and friend and friend). The 1911 revolution effectively eliminated the bond between ruler and subject, reducing the bonds to two and the relationships to four. While these other bonds and relationships remained operative, they were by no means untouched by the elimination of what was essentially a foundational bond and relationship. It is not surprising,

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then, to note that the 1911 revolution 'undermined both the traditional structure of gender discrimination and the value system that supported it' (Ono Kazuko 1989: 93-94). Individualism, feminism, and the critique of patriarchal and autocratic social structures became central concerns in Republican China, especially after the May Fourth demonstrations in 1919, which gave rise to the New Culture movement. While there was much interest in feminism and the phenomenon of the 'new woman' to which the publication of Ibsen's Doll's House in New Youth (June 1918) had drawn attention, feudal mentalities remained strong and feminist commitments and ideals somewhat embattled. To claim that Ruan Lingyu was the victim of feudal thinking is, thus, to point out that the unconventional private life for which she was condemned in a cycle of ever-intensifying rumours could seem deviant only from a pre-revolutionary perspective that locked women into subservient roles as chaste wives and mothers. The gossip to which Ruan Lingyu was subjected is not simply a natural corollary of stardom, but a symptom of the extent to which older norms pertaining to women's relationships and behaviour remain operative within a still emerging and intensely divisive political context where new models and possibilities lack the legitimacy of established norms. JeanNoel Kapferer's suggestion that 'every collectivity and social group has its preferred, virtually institutionalized scapegoats' (1990: 91) is compelling and relevant to the life of Ruan as depicted by Kwan. Women who had made the transition from a highly codified life to one allowing for more individualistic forms of self-exploration were prime targets for social energies that relied on the scapegoating logic of the many against the one. This logic is most forcefully felt in the scene in which Ruan (Cheung) visits Zhang Damin, only to discover that he has leaked her presence to neighbours and reporters. As Ruan emerges from Zhang's dwelling she is surrounded by the hostile mob and accosted with venomous remarks that assassinate her own character and, quite revealingly,


Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung) faces the threatening mob.

A slanderous pronouncement by a member of the gossiphungry mob prompts a physical response from Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung).

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that of her mother who is accused of providing the model for one of Ruan's on-screen prostitute roles. The persistence of feudal mentalities in Ruan's world is important, for while gossip is present in all societies, it is widely accepted that some modes of social and political organization are more likely to stimulate gossip than others. Jean-Noel Kapferer's position on this issue is particularly incisive and it is helpful briefly to evoke the general contours of his theory of rumour. Unlike many other scholars, Kapferer chooses to characterize rumours, not in terms of the truth or falsehood of their claims, but in relation to the nature of their source, which is always 'unofficial' (1990: 13). Following Kapferer, 'a rumour constitutes a relation to authority' and a 'spontaneous vie for the right to speak, no previous invitation having been made' (1990: 14). Rumours, claims Kapferer, arise when information is scarce as is characteristically the case in hierarchically organized societies. Hierarchy of the kind that was operative in pre-revolutionary China and beyond, generates opacity precisely because the flow of information is carefully regulated by specific roles that can only be exclusively and not generally held. Kapferer rightly notes that many rumours begin as a result of highly strategic leaks, and it is not difficult to see that the strategy of rumour would be all the more effective in situations that are socially dense, opaque, and hierarchical. Cultures of gossip are less likely to emerge, on the other hand, when social energies are channelled into the creation of transparent structures that allow for the easy circulation of information and for the expression and confirmation of intent in a properly dialogic manner. Kwan's film is at once an attempt to demonstrate just how valuable the gift of Ruan's artistic expression is and to understand the quasi-sacrificial logic of the social mechanisms that eclipsed it. The suggestion throughout is that if the progressive convictions and largely egalitarian modes of interaction of the Lianhua filmmakers had been more widely accepted in society, Ruan's tragic


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suicide might well have been avoided. Kwan discovers a precious communicative model in the Lianhua community and, using images that document the largely cognate interaction among members of his own cast and crew, makes a point of underscoring the appeal and continued relevance of the norms of friendship, honesty, generosity, and mutual respect that animated it. The director's cut of Center Stage includes many sequences in which Kwan and his crew interact in an exploratory and genuinely communicative manner that is deeply egalitarian. While Kwan is occasionally shown providing background information pertaining to the interviews and other forms of research that he wishes to share with his group, the communicative exchange is by no means unidirectional. Indeed, the emphasis is very much on a dialogic process in which the views of several members of the cast are solicited and listened to with respect and interest. In some scenes Kwan documents the way in which the discussion of the film continued well beyond the point required by the task of shooting a given scene or sequence. Thus, for example, Kwan and Tony Leung Ka-fai are shown watching rushes for the scene in which Cai Chusheng and Ruan Lingyu discuss the social and political implications of squatting. This documentary footage occurs immediately after a scene in which Ruan beseeches Cai Chusheng to leave his wife and mistress and accompany her to Hong Kong. While watching the rushes from the earlier scene, Tony Leung Ka-fai wonders aloud about Cai Chusheng's motivations for refusing Ruan's plea. His openended musings bring Maggie Cheung into the discussion, and she goes on to reflect on the possibility that Ruan's suicide might have been avoided if she and Cai Chusheng had somehow found a way of giving the love that was growing between them a chance. What emerges is an image of a congenial team of film practitioners who enjoy each others' company, respect each others' opinions and fully trust that an honest and sincere expression of views will be met with an appropriately communicative response. This is not a context

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where information is jealously guarded or carefully manipulated for personal advantage that comes at the cost of others. Whereas zero-sum games require agents to behave as selfish strategists with an eye for only personal gain, the communicative game of filmmaking to which Kwan gives the viewer access is predicated on the idea that precious gifts, in the form of insights or the synergy of outstanding performances, are the emergent effects of intense interaction among individuals who are motivated by goodwill and the intrinsic value of a shared activity, and oriented at all times toward mutual understanding. Kwan, it would appear, is deeply attuned to the phenomenon of gift culture, a phenomenon that was brilliantly theorized by Marcel Mauss (1990) as the anti-thesis of exchange culture. One of the themes of the many commentaries that have been written on Mauss's classic work is that gift culture cannot be as rigorously separated from exchange culture as the French sociologist would have us believe. This line of argument was first developed at some length by Jacques Derrida in Given Time and has since become a standard response to Mauss's theory. Kwan, I believe, operates with two quite different concepts of the gift. One of these concepts construes gifts as a form of pure giving without the anticipation of a return, while the other makes giving an inherently meaningful but also effective means towards a given end. Let us begin with the somewhat more instrumentalized conception. In an interview with Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Kwan talks about the value he places on trust on the set:

I believe that the relationship between the director and the actors is very important. And the trust between the director and the actor is very important too. ... Usually I involve the actors and actresses and we talk about the characters and the story line, but also about their private lives and about my private life. Basically the actors and actresses who worked on my earlier films know


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everything about Stanley Kwan, even the most private things. I really don't mind telling them everything about my life and my experiences because the relationship needs something like this, the honesty and the trust. I will certainly not force the actors and actresses to tell me anything about their private lives, but if they wish to share something with me I welcome this. Sometimes, for example, we may have difficulty with the script on the set. Usually we just get rid of the script and try to recall something that we have shared together, happiness, sadness, some personal experience. The idea is to find some shared emotions. ... My own sexuality is not a secret to them. They know all about my relationships with my boyfriends, my family, my mother, and so on. Dionnet's insightful response to Kwan's account of how he works as a director is as follows: 'to create a relationship, you give them something of yourself.' Kwan accepts this characterization of his approach with a simple 'yes'. The gift of self in a deeply confessional process is not some cynical means that Kwan adopts in order to create the atmosphere and environment that are most likely to produce high quality artistic work. At the same time, the confessional process is at some level caught up with a notion of exchange or return. It is important, however, to recognize that this notion can be operative within quite different forms of rationality, although the assumption for the most part is that exchange culture relies heavily on instrumental means-end deliberations of a fairly strategic or self-interested nature. Kwan's gift is not instrumentalized in this way, for the director clearly believes that the forging of a strong social bond through various forms of intimacy is something that is good in and of itself and not merely as a means towards the goal of producing a given film. Kwan is attuned to questions having to do with what makes a life worth living or a job worth doing, and his response is embedded within his gift: filmmaking gives meaning to life, but only if it can be more


than the pursuit of a product, only if it can be a form of horizontal community building. A conversation with Kwan in May 2005 emphasized a second and quite different concept of the gift. What is distinctive about this second type of gift is its metacommunicative dimension. More specifically, Kwan is attuned to a form of giving that articulates a grateful appreciation of the community and social bond that he has helped to create, one that circumvents narrow means-end calculations and affirms a given course of action as the inherently right thing to do. Kwan movingly recalls moments when he experienced an overwhelming sense of gratitude during the production of Center Stage. One of these moments concerned Maggie Cheung and Kwan's ongoing debate with her about the need to shave her eyebrows in order to achieve an authentic look in the reconstructions of Ruan's films. Cheung remained unconvinced for some time of the necessity of the proposed modification of her looks but changed her mind when she and Kwan watched the rushes from some of the relevant scenes. Kwan noticed that Cheung left the room without comment and with an air of decisiveness, but only realized what effect the rushes had had on the actress when she knocked on the door some time later and silently presented herself with shaved brows. A second anecdote provides another example of the gift as an instance of the metacommunicative affirmation of community and its constitutive social bond. Center Stage was over budget and Kwan had been given strict instructions by the producer Willie Chan to complete shooting for the film within twenty four hours. The cast and crew had been working continuously for thirty six hours, and in appalling heat, as they struggled to shoot one of the ballroom scenes. Kwan recalls the sense of profound and generalized exhaustion in the room and remembers being overwhelmed by the task at hand. The dedication of the group, to Kwan and to his project, became evident, however, the minute the band began to play its diegetic


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music. For Kwan the almost magical awakening of the group and palpable presence of intensely social energy in the room registered as a precious collective gift that was made possible by the strength of the social bond that existed among members of the group.

Lianhua, Kwan, and TVB I have been building a case for seeing a deep connection, having to do with norms and values, between Lianhua and the filmmaking milieus that Kwan chooses to be part of. A person's vision of what is worthwhile, or of what needs to be the case for participation in a given activity to be meaningful, is often shaped by a dialogic process involving encounters with inspirational figures. In the case of Kwan, the importance of an early encounter with a unique filmmaking milieu cannot be emphasized too much. After completing a degree in Communications at the Hong Kong Baptist College, Kwan joined TVE, a television station that is inevitably evoked as a decisive factor in any account of the emergence of the Hong Kong 'new wave' in the late 1970s and early 80s. While Kwan initially aspired to become an actor, he soon realized that his talents lay elsewhere. Acting aspirations were replaced by rewarding work as an assistant director to figures such as Patrick Tarn and Ann Hui who would go on, following their years at TVB, to direct some of the great classics of the Hong Kong new wave. Now, what is fascinating is that Kwan draws a direct connection between Lianhua and the TVB milieu that provided a hands-on training ground, a kind of '"Shaolin temple" for emerging filmmakers' in Hong Kong (Law Kar 2001, 40). Looking back at Hong Kongfilms,we could find there indeed [a] similar kind of movement [the comparative reference is to the 'golden era of China movies'], but it only lasted for a short time.

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I worked as assistant director to many of the leading directors of the 'new wave' group, and felt close to their work from the time they started directing for TV. Their TV work stood in strong contrast to the Hong Kong films of the late 1970s, and they managed to carry their innovative ideas (and higher technical standards) into their movies when they shifted from TV to the film industry. 3

What, we might ask, were some of the salient characteristics of the TVB environment in the late 1970s and why are parallels with an earlier moment in Chinese cinema warranted? In circles that are knowledgeable about Hong Kong cinema the consensus view is that Selina Chow, who headed the programming and production departments of TVB from 1975, played a critical role in defining the spirit and outlook of this progressive TV station. Shu Kei, who worked at TVB as a part time scriptwriter while completing his degree at Hong Kong University, describes Chow as an extraordinary figure with a gift for attracting talented people. More important, perhaps, especially in a Hong Kong context where hierarchy tends to undermine self-confidence and thus initiative and creativity, was Chow's unshakeable commitment to trusting the talent and the aspirations of the people she employed. Shu Kei remembers the TVB milieu as a high energy environment full of young Hong Kongers with recent degrees from foreign schools, all of whom were as passionate about their filmmaking as they were about the ideas and ideals that animated it. Chow introduced high quality drama series with 30-minute instalments, and these were shot on location on 16-mm film and aired only weeks later. The rapidity of the production process, combined with the ready access to film stock and equipment, created an effervescent space with a very powerful sense of belonging and community. People slept at TVB, not because some boss required work above and beyond the threshold of reason, but because they were completely involved in, and deeply proud to be part of, the creative process which was also


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an effervescent and ongoing experience of an intense social bond. When Kwan looks into the past of Chinese cinema and discovers Lianhua, he is in many ways reconnecting with a powerful vision of filmmaking as a socially transformative, world-making activity, a vision that he first encountered at TVB and has tried in every way to sustain in his own work as an independent filmmaker. Kwan's tribute to Lianhua in the form of Center Stage affirms filmmaking's potential to build communities that remain true to valuable ideals for which the number of spokespersons or advocates has always been insufficient. There are many reasons for returning to Center Stage, again and again, as the legitimate Hong Kong film classic that it is. One of the most powerful reasons will always be this biopic's ability to articulate a communicative model that cannot be ignored as overly abstract or without purchase on reality because it is precisely anchored in a historical moment that is made constantly to reference a more contemporary situation. The links between Shanghai and Hong Kong in Center Stage have nothing to do with regret or nostalgia and everything to do with the project of animating and reviving important ideals with a potential reach that extends well beyond any given country or system.

Notes

Chapter l 1.

2. 3.

Introduction

See Women {NurenXin, 1984), Love unto Waste {Dixia qing, 1986), Rouge (Yanzhi Kou, 1988), Full Moon in New York {Ren Zai Niuyue, 1990), and Red Rose, White Rose {Hong Meigui, Bai Meigui, 1994). http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/rro499/ PUcrr6.htm, accessed November 16, 2004. Ordinary Heroes, released in 1999, many years after Center Stage, is perhaps the clearest example of Hui's use of a dramatic genre to documentary effect. Focusing on the work of the Hong Kong activist, Father Franco Mello, Hui's political drama constantly references actual historical events and existing persons in an effort to evoke, if not literally document, the history of political activism in Hong Kong. The realist impulse, and apparently progressive critical intent that accompanies it in a Hong Kong context, have resurfaced more recently in the work of Fruit Chan, whose low-budget filmmaking with nonprofessional actors and reclaimed scrap film stock serves to

NOTES FOR PP. 16-61

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. u. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

document Hong Kong lives as experienced by the marginal and poor (see for example, Made in Hong Kong [Xianggang zhizao, 1997]). http://www.city.yamagata.yamagata.jp/yidff/catalog/en/97/special50l.html, accessed November 24, 2004. My thanks to Shu Kei for furnishing me with the treatment. Li Siu-leung first alerted me to this series. Posted May 26, 2004. www.resonance-online.article.php?fiche=3988, accessed December 2, 2004. The many references to Chiao are based on a phone interview conducted between Hong Kong and Taiwan on November 21, 2004. 'Actress,' Chicago Reader: Guide to Arts & Entertainment, http:// spacefinder.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/0046_ACTRESS. html, accessed November 15, 2004. Shu Kei, personal communication, October 28, 2004. 'Interview with Kwan,' http://Paristransatlantic.com/magazine/ interviews/kwan.html, accessed November 29, 2004. Cited in Daisy Ng, p. 53. http://www.brns.com/bblit21.html, accessed November 22, 2004. 'Remarks on Centre Stage in connection with the ICA Hong Kong Film Festival,' http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2002/07/09/actress_ 1992-review.shtml, accessed November 22, 2004. 'On Center Stag el http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.isp? id=iooi9i, accessed November 22, 2004. For a discussion of the legends associated with Ruan Lingyu, see Shu Kei (1984).

Chapter 2 1.

Film Style

Ponech takes issue with the emphasis that Plantinga's concept of indexing appears to place on social processes and insists that the status of a given work as fiction or non-fiction is determined by authorial intention. But such intentions must be communicated and here the kinds of discourses that Plantinga has in mind are clearly relevant. As Ponech himself points out, 'To wager that non-fictional motion pictures result from a particular kind of intention is not to hope that it will

NOTES FOR PP. 90-114

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always be immediately clear what the filmmaker's aims were. Aside from paying close attention to the cinematic work, it is sometimes necessary to steady our inferences about authorial goals with extensive background research, marshaling whatever evidence (notes, production documents, letters, interviews, other works in the filmmaker's corpus) might be pertinent to reconstructing the proximal intentions giving rise to the movie in question' (Ponech 35).

Chapter 3 1. 2.

3.

Relevance and Meaning

See Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge (2000) for a discussion of heritage culture as a resource. Nieh Erh, we might note in passing, composed 'The March of the Volunteers' ('Yiyongjun Jinxingqu') in 1932, in memory of those who chose to respond to Japanese aggression before Japan formally declared war on China. This song was later adopted as the national anthem of Communist China. http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/rro499/ PUcrr6.htm, accessed December 12, 2004.

Credits

Center Stage/Actress/Ruan Lingyu/Yuen Lingyuk Hong Kong 1992 Director Stanley Kwan Scriptwriter Yau Dai An-ping Story Peggy Chiao Cinematographer Poon Hang-sang

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CREDITS

Editors Cheung Yiu-chung Assistant Editors Joseph Chiang Cheung Kar-fai Art Director Piu Yau-muk Costume Design Piu Yau-muk Production Manager Tse Ka-wai Music Hsiao Chung Producers Jackie Chan Leonard Ho Executive Producers Willie Chan Tsui Siu-ming Production Company Golden Harvest

CREDITS

Cast Maggie Cheung ( 3 6 S i ) Carina Lau ( H * ^ ) Tony Leung Ka-fai ( S ^ f f ) Laurence Ng (^JScH) Waise Lee ( $ • ? * ! ) Chin Han (*JH) Cecilia Yip ( H m ) Paul Chang Chung (36?+)

as as as as as as as as

123

Ruan Lingyu (lkJ?3£) Li Lili (^|ij$j) Cai Chusheng ( H ^ £ ) Zhang Damin (36 U K ) Li Minwei (SrKft) Tang Jishan (Jf $flf) Lin Chuchu ( # f f ) Luo Mingyou (HEfift)

Distributor MediaAsia Copyright Fortune Star Entertainment Limited Versions Director's cut (1991): 148 minutes Director's edited version (1992): 121 minutes Director's digitally remastered copy of the 1991 film; images identical, pace slightly slower (2005): 154 minutes

Run at the Hong Kong Box Office 20 February - 26 March 1992 Box Office Take HK$7,48o,778

Awards and Nominations

12th Hong Kong Film Awards (1992) Awards: Best actress, Maggie Cheung Best cinematography, Poon Hang-sang Best production design, Piu Yau-muk Best original score, Hsiao Chung Best original film song, 'Zhan Xin' ('Buried Heart'); composition by Hsiao Chung, lyrics by Yao Rou-leong and Hsiao Chung, sung by Tracy Huang 12th Hong Kong Film Awards (1992) Nominations: Best film Best director, Stanley Kwan Best screenplay, Yau Dai An-ping Best costume design, Piu Yau-muk

126

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

4 2 n d Berlin International Film Festival (1992) Award: Silver Bear, Best actress, Maggie Cheung Chicago International Film Festival (1992) Awards: Best director, Stanley Kwan Best actress, Maggie Cheung 28th Golden Horse Awards (1991) Awards: Best cinematography, Poon Hang-sang Best actress, Maggie Cheung Best film from Hong Kong

Stanley Kwan's Filmography

Women {Nuren Xin), Hong Kong, 1984 Love unto Waste {Dixia Qing), Hong Kong, 1986 Rouge {Yanzhi Kou), Hong Kong 1988 Full Moon in New York {Ren Zai Niuyue), Hong Kong, 1990 Actress (aka Center StagejRuan Ling-yu), Hong Kong/Taiwan, 1992 Too Happy for Words {Liang Ge Nuren, Yi Ge Liang, Yi Ge Wu Liang), Hong Kong, 1992, short Siqin Gaowa Special {Siqin Gaowa Er-san Shi), Hong Kong, 1993 Two Sisters {Yi She Ren Liang Zimei), Hong Kong, 1993, TV programme Red Rose, White Rose {Hong Meigui, Bai Meigui), Hong Kong/ Taiwan, 1994 Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema {Nan Sheng Nu Xiang), UK/Hong Kong, 1996, documentary Still Love You After All These {NianNi Rushi), Hong Kong/Taiwan, 1997, documentary

128

STANLEY KWAN'S FILMOGRAPHY

Hold You Tight {Yue Kuaile, Yue Duoluo), Hong Kong, 1998 The Lsland Tales {You Shi Tiaowu), Japan/Hong Kong, 2000 Lan Yu {Lan Yu), Hong Kong, 2001 PaintedSoul {Hua Hun), 2003, TV programme A Wrong Marriage for Mother {Jia Chou Ma), TV programme Everlasting Regret {Chang Hen Ge), Hong Kong and PRC, 2005

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Index

Abbas, Ackbar, xiii, 20, 32; and the deja disparu, 33 acting, theories of, 54-6 Ah Ying, 13 Ai Xia, 2, 66,103-4 alienation effects, 63 art-deco style, 76 art design, 7 The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, 59 Ashworth, G. J., 95 Asia Television Limited (ATV), 17 assertive stance, 62 At the Hong Kong Movies: 600 Reviews from 1988 till the Handover, 25 attentive stance, 86 autonomy, aesthetic, 5

backdrops, 64-9, 74 The Battle of Shanghai, 96 Baoli Bona, 24 Beijing Film Archive, 94 beliefs; approximately true, 62; lacking sufficient evidence, 62; provisional, 62 Berlin International Film Festival, 21, 23, 24 'best available account', 8 2 - 8 A Better Tomorrow, 94 biopic, 3, 15, 20, 31; and make believe, 37; and tentativeness, 74 Blue Angel, 58 Boat People, 13 Bordwell, David, xiii, 63; on naturalism and conventionalism, 70

138

INDEX

Brecht, Bertolt, 63 British Film Institute, 92 Bu Wancang, 41, 49, 58, 65 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary {Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari), 68 Cai Chusheng; and Ai Xia, 103-4; interpretive reconstructions, 52; and New Woman {Xin Nuxing, 1934), 44, 78, 104; and Ruan Lingyu's involvement with, 39 camerawork, 69-78; and contextas-peripheral-detail, 73; and detail without perspective, 74; and dynamics of everyday perception, 70; and searching movement, 7 1 8 Capp, Bernard, 101 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 4; and etayage, 48 Center Stage, and awards, 24; and camerawork, 6 9 - 7 8 ; and centennial of Chinese cinema, 25; and discourse, 9 - 1 0 ; and distribution, 24; and fiction, nonfiction, and metacinema, 13; and formal/stylistic analysis, 7-8, 3 5 - 8 8 ; and Hong Kong, 11; and knowledge, 5 8 - 8 8 ; and impossibility of valid knowledge claims, 78; and love unto Waste, 29; and norms, 9, 101; and production history, 16-24; and script, 19-20; and set design, 6 3 9; and stardom, 3 2 - 3 4 ; and original director's cut and edited version, 21-23, 36; as allegory,

31-2; as queer text, 2 9 - 3 0 ; as women's film, 28-9; as reviewed by Paul Fonoroff, 25 certainty, 74 Chan, Fruit, 117 Chan, Jackie, 22 Chan, Stephen, xiii Chan Sui-hung, Natalia, 27 Chan, Willie, 112 Chang Cheh, 93-4 Chang, Sylvia, 29 Channel 4, 26 Chariots of Fire, 27 Chen Kaige, 94 Chen Wu, 105 Chen Yanyan, 85, 98 Cheung, Leslie, 17, 94 Cheung, Maggie; and allegory, 31; and best actress award, 24, 25; and casting, 17-19; and competing star images, 32; and competition with Kwan, 30; and gifts, 112; and gossip, 52; and manifest attentiveness, 84-7; and roles, 29; and Sun Yu's Memories of the Old Capital, 76 Cheung, Tammy, 12 Chiao, Peggy, xiii, 16,19, 20, 94 Chin Han, 43 Choi Kai-kwong, 95, 97 Chow, Selina, 114 chronological time, 4 Chui, Vincent, 11, 12 cinematic explanandum, 42-3 cinematic explanans, 4 2 - 3 Cinema de quartier, 17

INDEX

cinematic image; as historical trace, 37-45 City Nights {ChengshiZhi Ye), 53, 54, 55, 56, 97 A City of Sadness, 14 cognitive turn, 5 colour, 49-50 constatives, 88 context as peripheral detail, 73-8 context as perspicuous overview, 73 contingent universals, 70 conventionalism, 70 Corner, John, 59 Cukor, George, 29 cultural learning, 70 The Cultural Politics of Nostalgia in Contemporary Hong Kong Film and Memoir, 28 Cultural Revolution, 51 Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, 13 Dawson, Tom, 26 Derrida, Jacques, 110 detail without perspective, 74 dialogic stance, 82 diegetic music, 112-13 Dietrich, Marlene, 57 Dionnet, Jean-Pierre, 17, 22,46, 64, 91,110-11 director's cut, 21, 4 9 - 5 8 ; and communicative attitudes, 109; and meaning-amplifying role, 5 6 8; and meaning-inflecting changes, 53, 56 Dissanayake, Wimal, xiii

139

documentary filmmaking, 3; and artificial elements, 69; and challenges to naive theories of, 59; and Hong Kong, 10-16; and indexing, 61; and the real, 68 documentary images; and absolute truth, 63; and excisions, 51-53; as metacinematic, 46, 83; types of in Center Stage, 47 documentary theory, 59-61 Dogma, 11 Doll's House, 89,106 double temporal framework, 20 doubt, 78 ecological continuity, 70 Ecumenical Prize at the Berlin film festival, 13 editing and framing, 78-81 effective history, 10 epistemic access, 62 epistemological virtues, 78 etayage, 48; see Castoriadis everyday perception, 70 exchange culture, 110, i l l Fallen Angels, 93 fallibilism, 62-88 Farewell My Concubine, 94 Farmer, Brett, 32 Father and Son {Fuzi Qing), 13 Father Franco Mello, 117 Fei Mu, 53, 55, 57,105 feudalism, 105 fiction and non-fiction, 61 Active stance, 61 Fifth Generation, 94 film form, 7-8, 35-88

140

INDEX

film milieu as social system, 9 film style, 35-88 Fong, Allen, 13,15, 93 Fonoroff, Paul, 25 formal properties; as sensory triggers, 36 Forster, E. M., 27 friendship, 56,101 Fudan University, 98 Full Moon in New York {Ren Zai Niu-yue), 117 Garbo, Greta, S7 genre, 3-4; and discourse, 10 German Expressionism, 68 gift, 91; and metacommunicative dimensions, 112 gift culture, 110 Given Time, 110 The Goddess {Shennil), 43, 44, 54, 97

Golden Age of Chinese Cinema, 91, 92, 95, 96 Golden Harvest, 22, 23 Golden Horse Awards, 21 Gong Li, 29, 54 Good Gossip, 101 gossip, 9, 33, 52,100-13 Graham, Brian, 95 Grice, Paul, 8 handover, 4, 12; and Hong Kong's transformation from small nation to large nation, 6 Happy Together, 31 Harris, Kristine, 89, 90 heritage culture, 91-100; and zerosum characteristics, 95

heritage film, 27, 90 hermeneutics of suspicion, 6 Higson, Andrew, 27 hierarchy, 100 historical traces, 39-45 History, 96 Ho, Leonard, 21 Hofer, Johannes, 26 Hong Kong Arts Center, 15,17 Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 10,12 Hong Kong Baptist College, 113 Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 32 Hong Kong Film Archive, xiii Hong Kong Film Awards, 13, 24 Hong Kong International Film Festival, 24 Hong Kong new wave, 113 'Hong Kong Trilogy', 90 Hou Dejian, 13 Hou Hsiao Hsien, 14, 93 Howards End, 27 Hsiao Chung, 24 Hu Tieh, 38 Hui, Ann, 13,15,113 Ibsen, Henrik, 89,106 iconic image; and epiphanic potential, 41 image as documentary record, 37, 78,83 image as historical trace, 37,39-45, 49, 62, 78, 89, 81, 83 image as interpretive reconstruction, 44, 4 7 - 5 0 , 5 2 - 5 , 57, 62, 65, 68,

78-81

INDEX

International Women's Day, l, 105 The Island Tales, 90 Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation, 22

Japanese annexation of Manchuria, 98 June Fourth, 4,18 kairotic time, 4 Kapferer, Jean-Noel, 106,108 Kuomintang, 97 Kwan Fong Center for Cultural Research, xiii Kwan, Stanley; and the communicative game of filmmaking, 110; and documentary filmmaking, 3; and gift of self, 111; and gossip, 100; and The Island Tales, 90; and manifest attentiveness, 86; and original intentions, 18; and Rouge, x; and sceptical lesson, 80; and Sunless Days, 15; and Yang + Yin: Gender in the Chinese Cinema {Nan Sheng Nu Xiang, 1996), 4, 92; on a 'new creative spirit', 12-3; on distribution problems, 23; on the Golden Age of Chinese Cinema, 92 large nation, 34 Lau, Carina, 39; and manifest attentiveness, 83-4 Leaving in Sorrow, 11-12 Lee, Ang, 93 Leung Ka-fai, Tony, 52,57,109; and New Woman, 78-9 Lianhua studio, 1,19, 38, 41, 54, 56, 58,97; and communicative model,

141

109; and egalitarianism, 108; and heritage culture, 100; and social bond, 101; and TVB Li Cheuk-to, 25 Li Lili, 31,39,58; and acting lessons from Ruan Lingyu, 4 1 - 2 ; and manifest attentiveness, 83-4 Li Minwei, 19,20,38,39,97,98; and heritage culture, 95; on causes of Ruan's death, 105 Lin Chu-chu, 39,102,103 Li Siu-leung, 118 Little Toys {Xiao Wanyi, aka Small Toys2xA Gimmicks), 31, 41, 53, 97 Love unto Waste {Dixia qing), 29 Lu Xun; and 'gossip is a fearful thing', 3 Luo Mingyou, 96, 97, 98 Made in Hong Kong (Xianggang zhizao), 118 manifest attentiveness, 83 Marker, Chris, 14 Marxist psycho-semiology, 5 Mauss, Marcel, 110 May Fourth demonstrations, 106 Maxu Weibang, 94 MediaAsia, 23 Memories of the Old Capital, 38 Merchant-Ivory, 27 methodological choices, 5-10 Metz, Christian, 7 Minxin, 96 mise-en-scene, 7, 36, 63-9 Modleski, Tania, 30 monologic stance, 82

142

INDEX

Morris, Meaghan, xiii Moscow Art Theatre, 54 Mui, Anita, 17,18,19, 29 naturalism, 70 negative emotions, 90 neo-realism, ix, 4 New Culture Movement, 106 New German Cinema, ix, 4 New Hong Kong Cinema; and Center Stage, 4; and effective history, 10; and genre, x; and Hong Kong identity, 34; and kairotic time, 4; and nostalgia film, 17; and social and political crisis, ix New Woman {XinNuxing), 2,7,66, 78-81,104 New Woman incident, 89-90 New Youth, 106 Ng, Daisy, 28 Nie Gannu, 104 Nieh Er, 58, 98,100 nomos, 48 nostalgia film, 2 6 - 2 8 ; compared with historical film, 28; see also heritage film nouvelle vague, ix, 4 'one country, two systems', 31, 90 Ordinary Heroes, 117 Pan-Chinese film tradition, 95 paradox, 34, 62 past; as resource, 90 The Peach Girl{Taohua QiXueJi), 41,65 People's Republic of China, 18, 24 performative self-contradiction, 88

photographic image; iconic function of, 40 physis, 48 Piu Yau-muk, 19, 24, 64 Plantinga, Carl, 40, 60 Ponech, Trevor, 60, 62 Poon Hang-sang, 24 postcolonial era, 18 postmodernism, 59 poststructuralism, 59 practitioner's agency, 6-7 Princess Chang Ping, 16 Qing dynasty, 96, 97,105 Reading against the Grain {Guanyiji: zhongwai dianying plan), 25 Red Rose, White Rose {Hong Meigui, Bai Meigui), 29, 64 reflexivity, 46, 50, 58, 62-9 Reisenleitner, Markus, xiii relevance, 8-9 revolution (1911), 105-6 Reynaud, Berenice, 23, 28, 29, 45 Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film, 60 Ricoeur, Paul, 6 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 33 Rojas, Carlos, 32 A Room with a View, 27 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 21 Rouge {YanzhiKou), 17, 20, 29, 32, 33,64 Rouge (1925), 96 Ruan, Lingyu; and Ai Xia, 2; and competing star images, 32; and

INDEX

left-wing cinema movement, 97; and Li Minwei's diary, 19-20; and personal history, 1-3,55; and preLinhua films, 70; and resistance, 4 3 - 4 4 ; as Greta Garbo, 57; as unknowable, 60; as victim of feudal thinking, 106 rumour, 108 scapegoating, 100,102,106 scepticism, 88 A Sea of Fragrant Snow {XiangXue Hai), 57 searching camera, 73 Secondary School, 12 self-reference, 69 September 18th Incident, 39 shared culture, 95 Shen Ji, 19, 86 Shu Kei, xiii; and documentary filmmaking in an art house style, 13; and Hong Kong cinema practices, 21-2; and Hou Dejian, 14; and TVB, 114 Siggel, Lara Melin, 23 Silver Bear award, 24 Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984), 4 Siqin Gaowa, 29 Siqin Gaowa Special {Siqin Gaowa Er-dan Shi), 16 The Slaughter in Xian, 94 small nation; and Hong Kong, 6 Song at Midnight, 94 sound-image relations, 7, 36 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 54, 55 Stardom, 104,106

143

Still Love You After All These {Man Ni Rushi), 16 The Story of'Woo Viet, 13 Stringer, Julian, 7, 31, 32 Sun Yat-sen, 96, 97 Sun Yu, 31,38,40,41,42,51,58,84, 85 Sunless, 14 Sunless Days, 13 Tarn, Patrick, 113 Tambling, Jeremy, 31 Tang Jishan, 54, 104, 105; and forged suicide notes, 2, 39 tentativeness, 74 theatricality, 62, 68, 69 thematic analysis, 35-6 Thompson, Kristin, 63 three bonds, five relationships, 105 Three Modern Women {Sange Modeng Nuxing, aka Three Modern Girls), 49, 65, 97 Tiananmen massacre, 12,14,18 Tiananmen Square Goddess of Democracy, 14-15 truth-as-correspondence, 63, 69 Tsim, James, xiii Tsui Hark, 13 Tunbridge, J. E., 95 TVB, 113-15 Two Stage Sisters {Wutai Jiemei), 94 UCLA, 19 uncertainty, as framework fact, 90 United Service, 96 Venice film festival, 14

144

INDEX

Videopower, 11,12 Vinterberg, Thomas, 12 Violet, Christopher, 17 Virilio, Paul, 33 Visible Record Limited, 12 von Sternberg, Josef, 28, 58 von Trier, Lars, 12 Waise Lee Chi-hung, 95 Waves Wash the Sand, 94 'what if scenarios, 48 What is Non-Fiction Cinema?, 60 When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, 101 Where Angels Fear to Tread, 27 Wiene, Robert, 68 Wild Flower, 38, 40 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 61 Women {Nuren Xin), 117 women's film, 4, 10, 28-30 Wong Kar-wai, 31, 93 Wong Hang-san, Cecilia, 17 Wong Ting Ting, xiv

Woo, John, 94 Wu Yonggang, 44, 47, 94 Xianggang dianying zhi fu Li Minwei, 95-6 Xie Jin, 94 Yam Kin-fai, 93 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 16 Yang + Yin: Gender in the Chinese Cinema {Nan Sheng Nu Xiang), 13,16, 29, 30, 92-5 Yang, Edward, 93 Yau Dai An-ping, 19, 20 Ying E Chi, 11,12 Yip Tung, Cecilia, 39,102 Yu Dong, 24 Zhang Damin, 2, 39, 102, 103, 104, 105,106 Zhang Yimou, 28 Zheng Ji Hua, 19 Zhu Shi Lin, 16 Zu, 13 Zuangzi tests his wife, 96

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Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self

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Frommer's Portable Hong Kong

Frommer's Hong Kong

Ancestral Images: The Complete Hong Kong Album (Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series)

The Archaeology of Hong Kong

Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945: Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley (Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies)

World of Darkness: Hong Kong

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Hoog Spel In Hong-Kong

Hoog spel in Hong-Kong

Hoog Spel In Hong-Kong

Hong Kong in Transition: The Handover Years

Hong Kong: The Road to 1997

Stanley Kwan's Center Stage (The New Hong Kong Cinema Series)

Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1978-2000)

Hong Kong

Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self

Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Hong Kong and Macau

Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination

Hong Kong & Macau

Sunrise in Hong Kong

Frommer's Portable Hong Kong

Frommer's Hong Kong

Ancestral Images: The Complete Hong Kong Album (Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series)

The Archaeology of Hong Kong

Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945: Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley (Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies)

World of Darkness: Hong Kong

A coffin from Hong Kong

A Coffin From Hong Kong

Building Hong Kong: Environmental Considerations

Hoog spel in Hong-Kong

Hoog Spel In Hong-Kong

Reef Fishes of Hong Kong

Another Disaster: Hong Kong Sketches

Site preparation for the new Hong Kong International Airport

Hoog Spel In Hong-Kong

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Hong Kong in Transition: The Handover Years

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