Hong Kong Leftist Cinema During the Cold War — a Discussion of the Hong Kong Leftist Film the True Story of Ah Q

Front. Lit. Stud. China 2015, 9(1): 131−145 DOI 10.3868/s010-004-015-0006-1 RESEARCH ARTICLE Yuping WANG Alternative New China Cinema: Hong Kong Leftist Cinema during the Cold War — A Discussion of the Hong Kong Leftist Film The True Story of Ah Q Abstract The paper discusses the 1957 Hong Kong film The True Story of Ah Q. As a Hong Kong leftist film, its plot and production process are relevant to understanding the political and cultural life of New China. However, Hong Kong leftist cinema played an important role in the reception of New China cinema overseas; it can only be understood within the context of political and cultural life in New China. This paper explores the complicated relations between Hong Kong leftist cinema, domestic socialist cinema, and Shanghai left-wing cinema in the 1930s. In addition, it discusses The True Story of Ah Q as a film with features that identify it with both Hong Kong leftist cinema and New China cinema. Thus, the film’s acceptibility is determined by the tensions between these two identifications. Keywords Hong Kong leftist cinema, Shanghai left-wing cinema, Socialist cinema, the cinema of new-democratic revolution, The True Story of Ah Q Introduction In 1956, in memory of Lu Xun’s 20 years death anniversary, Beijing Film Studio put his novel “New Year Sacrifice” (Zhufu) into a film. The PRC’s Vice Minister of Culture Xia Yan 夏衍 adapted the novel for this movie. In the same year and for the same reason, the Hong Kong studio The Great Wall Film Production Co., Ltd. began plans to shoot The True Story of Ah Q, with the screenwriters Xu Yan (namely Yao Ke 姚克) and Xu Chi 徐遲 and the director Yuan Yang’an 袁仰安. In January 1957, The True Story of Ah Q formally began shooting, and, towards the end of that year, the film was completed and underwent an internal pre-screening. Throughout the production process, the film was closely watched Yuping WANG ( ) School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China E-mail: [email protected] 132 Yuping WANG by Hong Kong and global media outlets. After it was released, critics in Singapore, Indonesia, Myanmar, Hong Kong, and elsewhere praised the film as “an unprecedented box-office hit and sensational success.”1 The film even won an award at the 11th Switzerland Locarno Film Festival. However, it was not screened on Chinese mainland markets until 1986, when it was showed in the small art exchange fairs in Guangzhou and Shanghai, which had benefited from China’s reform and opening up policy that started from 1978. The film’s reception varied greatly in different markets. In order to understand varying perspectives and interpretations of the film, it is necessary to examine it within the context of Hong Kong leftist cinema and New China cinema. The appealing term New China was widely used after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, defined here as PRC, but it placed a stronger emphasis on a brand new ideology and promised a better and hopeful country and future. New China cinema certainly stressed the acceptance and propaganda of the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. The Hong Kong film The True Story of Ah Q is directly relevant to understanding the political and cultural life of New China, in terms of its production process and internal narratives. The film participates in both leftist and New China cinematic discourses, and it is precisely the tension between these two identifications that have determined its acceptibility. The Great Wall Film Company and Hong Kong Leftist Cinema The Great Wall Film Production Co., Ltd (New Great Wall), which produced The True Story of Ah Q, was a leading leftist film company in Hong Kong during the mid-twentieth century. In the history of Hong Kong cinema, the so-called “leftist” film companies are those which considered the People’s Republic of China to be their motherland and accepted the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. The most well known of these companies were The Great Wall Film Production Company, Feng Huang 鳳凰 Motion Picture Co., and Sun Luen 新聯 Film Company, also known by the abbreviated name “Great, Feng and Sun” 長鳳新. Among these three studios, “Great Wall” was the oldest and the wealthiest, and it operated on a larger scale than the other two. “Great Wall” was founded in 1950 as a rebranding of the Great Wall Studio Company (“Old Great Wall”), which had been established in 1949 by Zhang Shankun 張善琨 and Yuan Yang’an. 1 “Ah Q zhengzhuan de rongyu” [The honor of the True Story of Ah Q], Changcheng huabao, Dec. 1958, no. 12. .

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