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Friday, October 18, 2019, 12:01
Two cities on a celluloid trip
By Mathew Scott
Friday, October 18, 2019, 12:01 By Mathew Scott

Maggie Cheung plays 1930s Shanghai actress Ruan Lingyu in the Stanley Kwan-directed Center Stage. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Priscilla Chan’s work as assistant curator of Hong Kong Film Archive (HKFA) is often full of surprises. Imagine the thrill of watching old movies being brought back to life and long-forgotten stars being given a new lease of life on the big screen.

Still, the discovery of Struggle proved to be extra special.

“We knew about the film but there were never any rumors that a copy of it still existed,” Chan says. “Often we know there might be copies (of a film) somewhere and we start searching. This one caught us completely by surprise and it was like finding hidden treasure.”

Chan and the HKFA team traveled to San Francisco in 2012 to look through a private library of vintage movies owned by former studio head Gordon Fong. He mentioned a friend who had a cinema and a dusty old film vault.

“There in the dust were old nitrate films. Usually by now, these things have disappeared or been destroyed,” says Chan. The team brought the films back to Hong Kong, where HKFA’s conservation staff found a film among them that no one knew about. “We kept looking and restoring and we found that it was Struggle,” Chan recalls.

Now restored to its full glory, the HKFA copy of Struggle, made in 1933, is believed to be the last existing film from Shanghai’s Unique studio. Also known as Tianyi, the studio was the first to be started by the Shaw brothers, who went on to establish film companies in Hong Kong and dominate Chinese cinema for decades.

Directed by Fan Peilin, Orioles Banished from the Flowers stars singing-acting superstar Zhou Xuan. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

The film provides yet another link between the filmmaking industries of Shanghai and Hong Kong, a relationship currently being celebrated through HKFA’s Archival Gems program.

Through the lens of rare movies from long-shuttered studios, the retrospective charts the course of inspiration and even collaborations between filmmakers from the two cities. There are old films such as Struggle — a tale of two love-struck farm workers who fall foul of an evil boss — and works by filmmakers who are still active, as showcased by Tsui Hark’s Shanghai Blues (1984), a Cantonese romantic comedy that pays homage to some of the classics of Shanghai cinema.

Ties that bind

The film ties between the two cities dates back to the fathers of Hong Kong cinema — Lai Man-wai and Lai Pak-hoi — whose film careers were kick-started in the early 1920s with the help of a Shanghai-based Ukrainian -American named Benjamin Brodsky. 

“By the 1950s we were seeing what is known as the first Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema and that would never have happened without Shanghai, and the Shanghai connection in Hong Kong,” says film historian Sam Ho, who is among the experts giving post-screening talks during Archival Gems.

“The skills, the system of production and also the money for Hong Kong film first came down from Shanghai,” Ho adds.

A restored version of Shanghai director Qiu Qixiang’s 1933 film Struggle is on show at the Hong Kong Film Archive-hosted Archival Gems program. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

While Archival Gems features films many may have forgotten — or have never known about in the first place — it also presents a chance for contemporary audiences to revisit films featuring Zhou Xuan, one of the greatest stars of Chinese cinema whose life tragically ended in an insane asylum in 1957 when she was just 37. 

“She is still relatively well-known today, chiefly because of her hit records, which have never stopped being reissued and are now almost all available on YouTube,” says film historian Paul Fonoroff. 

At the time, Zhou also had the longest film career of any musical star, lasting from the mid-1930s until the early 1950s. The films she starred in “covered just about every genre, from costume drama to musical comedy, and are a good representation of Mandarin-dialect filmmaking in Hong Kong, where many Shanghainese filmmakers had taken refuge during a period of political and economic upheaval within China,” says Fonoroff. 

For those who want to watch Zhou in action, Archival Gems features a screening of Orioles Banished from the Flowers (1948), one of her most representative films.

If you go

Archival Gems: One Tale, Two Cinemas

Hosted by Hong Kong Film Archive

Dates: Until May 3, 2020

Venue: Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive

50, Lei King Road, Aldrich Bay

www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/en_US/web/hkfa/programmesandexhibitions/programmes/onetale/schedule.html


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