| 摘要: | Martial arts films of Hong Kong are often dismissed as apolitical, ahistorical,
escapist, and devoid of social critique. However, my dissertation shows that
this is not the case by offering a critical reading of contemp'orary Hong Kong
martial arts films. Focusing on the first three episodes of director Tsui Hark's
Once upon a Time in China series (1991-1992), this study applies cultural
studies to address such issues as political allegory, carnivalesque pleasures of
resistance, representational politics, oppositional gendered readings, and the
juxtaposition of turn-of-the century history, fiction, and contemporary
politics.
The series centers on the most well-known cinematic martial arts hero
in Hong Kong, Huang Feihong, whose stories has been adopted in over one
hundred movies since 1949. My study argues that these films can be read as a
contemporary myth and political allegory in response to the crisis of 1997,when Hong Kong is to be taken over by the PRC after one century of
colonial dominance. Such postmodern strategies as the incongruous
juxtaposition of politics and commercialism, the recycling of antecedent and
rival filmic and non-filmic texts, the maintenance and subversion of generic
paradigms, and the mixing of fictional figures and events with historical
ones, are contained in these films. These strategies produce an ironic
rethinking of colonial history and the current political situation and a
parody of the traditional hero. History and contemporary politics are thus
questioned when fin de siecle Chinese history is playfully dismantled as a
collage of official historical events, slippery memory, martial arts anecdotes,
current political crisis, and images of popular culture. |
