The Forgotten Sexy Bombs: The Nude Stars in Hong Kong Cinema of the 1970s
Enoch Yee-lok Tam (Lingnan University)
In the standard historiography of Hong Kong cinema, the 1970s was an era when masculine bodies or the bodies of yanggang (staunch masculinity) dominated the silver screen through the good-selling and perennial genre of martial arts films. Scholarly efforts rarely pay attention to the contribution of the (nude) bodies of female stars to the development of Hong Kong cinema during that time. Some scholars examine soft-core erotic films (fengyuepian) by directors Li Han-hsiang and Lui Kei from an auteur perspective to reappraise their neglected significance. Other scholars view the genre as unimportant to the history of Hong Kong cinema. In fact, in the 1970s, Hong Kong films became increasingly sensationalistic. Filmmakers deployed every shock tactic at their disposal and assaulted the viewer’s senses and sensibilities. They capitalized on the sensationalism of violence (quantou/fist) and sex (zhentou/pillow), which became immensely popular and thrived in that decade. Nude stars in those erotic flicks of “pillow” were branded as “sex bombs” (roudan/jukdaan) by journalistic writing and publicity materials. They were so ubiquitous, along with muscular Kung Fu figures, that it was impossible to ignore them. It has been well researched the male body of yanggang, the sensationalism of violence, and their relationship with modernity, but little has been done on the female body of nude stars and the sensationalism of sex. Through the cases of nude stars such as Di Na, Hu Chin, Chen Ping, and others, the paper argues that nude stars played a major role in shaping an era of sensational femininity which was later undermined by the rise of “pure girl” (yunü/jukneoi) in the late 1970s.
Gender Negotiation of the Modelled Women: Subjectivity and Empowerment in Revolutionary Model Opera Films
Hui Miao (Xi’an-Jiaotong-Liverpool University)
Much of the Post-Mao scholarship has defined the Cultural Revolution period as a time of erasure of gender and sexuality. The claim is based on the general masculinisation of society at the time. Women are particularly represented with genderless dress codes and without sexual desire. The reassessment of the discourse on gender in China during the Cultural Revolution has provided evidence for differences of female and male representation based on traditionally accepted gender characteristics, or offered perspective to understand gender diversification over the period. The Cultural Revolution opens up space for representations that diversifies gender roles and mobilises a range of gender roles for consideration.
These understandings, however, simplify the perplexity of gender relations and downplay the importance of a broader scheme of subjectivity reconstruction during the Cultural Revolution by placing women along the gender only axis. The mobilisation of gender roles occurred amid an unprecedented trauma and a colossal human migration of sent-down youths to the countryside, and society was witnessing pervasive xenophobia. The gender negotiation should not be understood as imposed by the state’s gender discourse. Instead, agentic gender negotiation provides meaningful ways for women to imagine and enact a new subjectivity against the misrepresentation and exclusion that women generally suffer.
Through analysing the revelation of the inner worlds of the female characters and their relationship negotiations with others in Revolutionary Model Opera films Hongdeng ji (Legend of the Red Lantern, 1970) and Haigang (Harbour, 1972), this paper argues that, for women, gender negotiation is their reformist and accommodationist resistance and construction to negotiate their new identities within the extreme political context. Agentic gender negotiation becomes a method to cope with the intense hardships and alienations of the Cultural Revolution, and also an active engagement with trauma and memory, which is often silenced in a Post-Mao victimising discourse.
I’ve Hated You, But You Are All I Have”: A Post-Feminist Examination of Girlfriend Culture in Chinese Girlhood Film
Liao Zhang (University of Nottingham)
During the 2010s, female friendship has become a new theme that appears in Chinese films that focus on girls and girlhood. The depiction of girls’ homosociality in these films, for one thing, “provide images of alternative lifestyles for women based on meaningful social relationships with other women” (Hollinger, 1998), which has challenged the dominant heteronormative narrative in other contemporary Chinese girlhood films; for another, it showcases a contradictory as well as overlooked girlfriend culture that has a strong association with post-feminist cultures. This contradiction is reflected in the fact that girls’ friendship in films can enact an intimate network of “girlfriend gaze” (Winch, 2013), which enable girlfriends to achieve a kind of “complete perfection” (McRobbie, 2015), or a form of post-feminist representability (Negra, 2009) through their supportive mutual monitoring and regulation; however, when this strategic “girlfriend gaze” breeds intimacy among the girlfriends, it also leads to unceasing comparison, competition, and self-discipline among the girls.
Drawing on Alison Winch’s concept of “girlfriend gaze”, this paper explores the ambivalent representation of female friendship in Chinese girlhood films through a textual analysis of Soul Mate (Derek Tsang, 2016), as well as examine such post-feminist girlfriend culture within its specific geo-cultural context. Furthermore, as Gill (2017) emphasizes, “a key feature of postfeminist culture is the centrality accorded to the body — particularly to women’s bodies”, such a focus on the female bodies is also seen in Chinese girlhood films. Using examples from Soul Mate, this paper will demonstrate how the two girls connected through the intimate interaction of their bodies, and how they monitor, compete and regulate each other’s bodies to constitute a post-feminist girlfriend culture in contemporary Chinese girlhood films.
Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge
Paul Bevan (University of Oxford)
Ma Suzhen is best known today for films made about her since the 1970s. The long list of productions that feature her brother Ma Yongzhen is even more impressive, the latest having been premiered as recently as 2020. The first film in which they both appeared, Ma Yongzhen of Shandong, was released in 1927 and was directly based on a 1923 stage play. These are the two main sources responsible for the popularisation of the legend of Ma Suzhen, for she is, in fact, an entirely fictitious character. Ma Yongzhen, on the other hand, was very much a living, breathing historical figure who rode the horses of Shandong and trod the streets of Shanghai during the mid-nineteenth century.
The film is not amongst those which today take pride of place in the extensive Mingxing catalogue, though it was hugely popular when first released. Despite being lost, a significant amount of information about it can be gleaned from a souvenir issue of Mingxing magazine. The play on which the film was based had been produced by two of the most famous theatrical figures of the time, Zheng Zhengqiu and Zhang Shichuan. Both were involved in the Xiao wutai, a theatre managed by Runje Shaw, whose siblings would dominate martial arts film production for much of the twentieth century. Shaw ran the theatre with Zheng and Zhang before they went their separate ways, Shaw establishing the Tianyi Film Company and the other two men setting up the Mingxing Film Company in 1922. Zhang and Zheng went on to be director and screenwriter, respectively, of Ma Yongzhen of Shandong, in which Ma Suzhen appears as a central character. This paper explores the process by which the fictitious character of Ma Suzhen came to prominence as a popular heroic figure in early twentieth-century China.