Wen 丨 Kaiyin
The evolution of female characters in post-war Hong Kong films has always been one of the most representative manifestations of the gender consciousness of Chinese films.
In the films produced by Cathay Pacific and Shaw in the 1950s and 1960s, the female characters played by famous female stars such as Lin Dai, Lottie, Ling Bo, Li Lihua and others dominated the film, while men were far inferior to female stars in terms of role and box office appeal.
"False Phoenix" (1947) "False Phoenix" (1947)
But this does not mean that women really have an equal status with men in the film creation and industrial system; on the contrary, their image on the screen is more weak and helpless to endure humiliation and burden, limited by the traditional concept of male superiority and female inferiority and suffering; even if they have a certain spirit of resistance, they often encounter the gratuitous "punishment" of fate in the story plot, becoming a symbolic symbol of the tragic fate of women in traditional Chinese society.
Behind such a screen image, the female character is essentially under the "gaze" of the male audience (or the audience with the traditional social thinking of the patriarchal power), and is the carrier to satisfy the ideological imagination of the latter's moral tradition.
Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (1963)
Facts have also proved that the prosperity of this female image is accompanied by the "fragility" of commercial film profit-seeking. With the great commercial success of the new martial arts film genre that Zhang Che and others began in the late 1960s, the so-called "male masculinity" quickly dominated the mainstream of the screen, representing strong and even violent male action and body presentations becoming the main body of the film.
In addition to the actresses in several of Hu Jinquan's martial arts films ("Drunken Man", "Chivalrous Woman", "The Storm of Yingchun Pavilion"),the vast majority of women in Hong Kong action movies have rapidly declined into dispensable "vase" supporting roles. In many kung fu movies of the seventies, even female characters were completely eliminated.
The Woman (1970)
On the other hand, with the rise of tertiary pornography, the entertainment objectification of the female body has also become the trick to the attention of commercial films. It can be said that in the Hong Kong films of this period, the development of female characters has fallen to an unprecedented low overall.
At the end of the 1970s, The Hong Kong New Wave directors who had received film education in the West, such as Hui Anhua, Yan Hao and Fang Yuping, successively made films such as "The Story of Hu Yue", "Running to the Fury Sea", "Half the Man", "Like a Year of Flowing Water", etc., in which female figures with a lifelike and considerable emotional and mental complexity appeared, which pulled the female characters back from the marginalized and thin state back to the normal "film reality".
However, these films are often dubbed "literary films" and have not had a profound impact on mainstream commercial films. In the 1980s, the filmmakers who really consciously revolutionized the image of women in commercial films were none other than Xu Ke.
The Story of Hu Yue (1981)
As a member of the New Wave director, Tsui Ke's early three works "Spy Change", "Hell Without Doors" and "First Type Danger" were far more intense and extreme than others, so he was specially "cared for" by the Hong Kong-British electricity inspection system.
After painfully thinking about it, his "turnaround" is also surprising: from a strong social expression into the embrace of pure commercial films, the films "Ghost Horse Zhiduoxing", "New Shushan Swordsman" and "Shanghai Night" have very eye-catching commercial box office performances.
Shanghai Night (1984)
In the 1984 commercial comedy "Shanghai Night", the two main characters Xue Jie (played by Zhang Aijia) and Stool Boy (played by Ye Qianwen) show a different sense of gender independence.
Although Zhang Aijia in the film plays a fallen dancer, she always refuses the attempt of men to deprive her of her autonomous status and include her in her arms, and has always been proud of her self-reliance and does not rely on anyone's lifestyle; and the stool boy with the atmosphere of a female student especially cherishes the female friendship with Xue Jie, and even plans the concept of a "three-person family" and wants to maintain a pure friendship with Xue Jie forever.
Behind the relaxed and cheerful comedic atmosphere of "Shanghai Night", we see two young women with a strong sense of autonomy, maintaining ardent ideals, and trying to get rid of male control. They carry independent personality ideas to distinguish them from the women who existed as "appendages" of patriarchal society in the early Cathay and Shaw costume films; compared with the facial female "paper man" characters in martial arts films, their personality characteristics are much richer, with unprecedented delicate emotional charm.
This idea continued into the subsequent work of Xu Ke, "Dao Ma Dan".
Xu Ke deliberately planted the seeds of women's gender issues in the film: bai yu (played by Ye Qianwen), the daughter of the head of the drama class in the film, is a fool, but she cannot achieve her wish because of the rules that women cannot perform on stage; but with the development of the plot, Bai Yu and Xiang Hong (played by Zhong Chuhong) both put on makeup and appeared on stage, not only staged a wonderful fight scene, but also contributed to the action of the revolutionary party.
Knife Martin (1986)
"Dao Ma Dan" looks like an action comedy set in the Republic of China Revolution, but the essence focuses on the portrayal of the friendship between the three female protagonists. The three women meet in Pingshui, but in the dramatic development of the plot, they constantly eliminate misunderstandings between each other, and finally establish an unbreakable brotherhood.
All the men in the film retreat to secondary or negative roles and become foils for women's friendship. It is said that Zheng Haonan, who was in the ascendancy period at that time, resigned from the role of the little horse brother in "The True Colors of Heroes" in order to play the male number one revolutionary party killer in "Dao Ma Dan"; but after the "Dao Ma Dan" came out of the film, he found that although he was still the number one of the male characters, compared with the three female characters, he had become a "vase" with a weak sense of existence.
Xu Ke, who turned to commercial entertainment films, no longer has enough space to show his vigorous social critical ideology during the New Wave period, but he has transformed such ideas into a subversion of traditional gender consciousness, the most prominent point here is the reshaping of Lin Qingxia's screen image.
In the 1970s, Lin Qingxia was famous for playing gentle and beautiful female characters in the "Qiong Yao Drama" type of youth love movies, but after coming to Hong Kong, she was discovered by Xu Ke to discover the "rigid" side of her personality image. In 1983's "New Shushan Swordsman", Xu Ke had already given her character a heroic connotation trait; and in "Dao Ma Dan", she simply let her appear as a neutral male, becoming the one of the three female characters who played a masculine balancing role.
Interestingly, in Xu Ke's Republic of China-themed films, women are no longer the small family jasper who follow the rules and stick to the rules in the courtyard of the deep house, but new women with innovative thinking after returning from studying abroad, often more open and active than traditional Chinese men, and always ideologically influence the men around them (such as the thirteen aunts in "Huang Feihong").
Huang Feihong (1991)
In "Dao Ma Dan", Cao Yun, played by Lin Qingxia, has become a staunch revolutionary party when she returns from abroad, not only removing the ideological shackles tied to women in the old feudal society, but also striving to bring the other two women of the old society, the maid Bai Yu and the singer Xiang Hong, on the road of mutual assistance and national salvation, as if she had become a female revolutionary who led the liberation.
When Lin Qingxia in the film appears in a man's military uniform and wearing bright riding boots, the ambiguity of gender identity adds an inexplicable charm to her, and Xu Ke's excavation of the potential of her screen image has not stopped at the level of text ideology.
In "New Dragon Gate Inn", Lin Qingxia appeared for the first time as a man in ancient costume, and a cool and capable heroism ran through the whole film, and the delicate inn owner lady Zhang Maggie Zhang in the film formed a wonderful contrast between different temperaments among women. When Xu Ke led the filming and production of the sequel to "Smiling Proud of the Jianghu" (he served as the supervising producer, in fact, he controlled all the creative directions and details), the role of "Oriental Undefeated" with dual gender characteristics was obviously Lin Qingxia.
The design of the character's gender is wrongly designed and sculpted to reach a climax in "The Undefeated Rise of the East": not only does lin Qingxia's Oriental undefeated have an unprecedented magic due to the strange indignability of male and female gender, but even Wang Zuxian, who was previously in "The Ghost of a Woman", is also dressed in men's clothing; the two launch a life-and-death love of lesbian emotions under the disguised male appearance, which is rare in Hong Kong movies.
The Undefeated Rise of the East (1993)
Xu Ke's bold attempt to portray love that broke through gender taboos reached a state of subversion in the early 1990s.
First of all, in "Green Snake", he uses large brushstrokes to render the bisexual love affair in a strange state: at the beginning of the film, the white snake (played by Wang Zuxian) and the green snake (played by Maggie Cheung) are wrapped around the body of the ear sideburns, and Xu Ke cleverly borrows the snake's creeping posture to portray the two women's glue-like attachment state as a good god, and then uses exaggerated teasing scenes to borrow the body of the green snake (Maggie Cheung) in the water to wrap around the body of East China to symbolize the process of male and female love.
If it is an explicit scene, it should have a strong erotic meaning, but Xu Ke consciously let the women control the initiative of the scene, compared to the openness, freedom and moral responsibility of the white snake and the green snake, the men in the film are timid and cowardly, conceited and even moral, and need to be guided by women with a sacrificial spirit to finally complete the process of self-knowledge.
Green Snake (1993) Green Snake (1993)
In the subsequent filming of "Liang Zhu", Xu Ke staged a gender-perverse singing: Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo, who disguised themselves as male students, had a good feeling for each other in the academy, but we could never understand whether Liang Shanbo was in love with a mischievous and elf and eccentric boy, or a girl who stubbornly disobeyed her father's orders after the true identity of the woman was exposed.
Zhu Yingtai, played by Yang Caini, exudes transgender innocence and bravery between the switching between men's/women's clothing in the film, which makes the love affair between the two people in "Liang Zhu" suddenly transcend the level of love in the tragic grandeur of the ending, and radiate a sense of courage to feel sorry for each other.
Liang Zhu (1994)
From 1983 to 1994, Tsui Ke repeatedly explored ways to break through gender taboos and highlight female characters within the framework of commercial films through various carefully set narrative and directing techniques for more than a decade, thus reflecting the backwardness, conceit, dullness and insensitivity of the male world.
In 1991's "Huang Feihong", Xu Ke filmed such an unforgettable scene: Liang Kuan, who came from the countryside to Foshan, was strongly attracted by the style of the thirteen aunts who returned from staying in the West - whether it was her fashionable hair style, or the Western camera she carried, and more importantly, her unworldly and beautiful posture, which made Liang Kuan intoxicated; he witnessed her drifting away in the rain, but when he turned around, he saw a naked big man next to him performing the Boxer-style Golden Gun Lock Throat Hard Qigong in the applause of the masses. As the barrel of the gun broke and the tip of the gun landed, the copper coin fell like raindrops at the feet.
Xu Ke did not let the characters make any verbal judgment on this scene, but the audience witnessed a huge contrast through Liang Kuan's perspective: on the one hand, the vivid charm brought by the new trend of women's ideas, on the other hand, the backward numbness of men's addiction to divine skills, civilization and ignorance, progress and stagnation, a thousand words turned into a silent feeling on the screen at this moment.
Only at such moments can we feel that the flame of ideological subversion that burned in Xu Ke's chest in the late 1970s has not really been extinguished, and his New Wave style has continued into the 1990s through a groundbreaking presentation of the issue of women's gender/gender relations.