港大中文學院

School of Chinese Scholar Seminar

A Lonely Woman Warrior:

Sounds of the Book and Sword in Ann Hui’s Historical Cinema

Abstract:

From the very beginning of her filmmaking career, Ann Hui (許鞍華) has cultivated a close affinity to the martial arts (wuxia) cinema, one of the most visible genres in Hong Kong film industry. Meanwhile, Hui has long been acclaimed as a prominent New Wave director with strong humanist concerns for diasporic groups and grassroots communities. Ain Ling Wong once characterized such a dialectic relation between the dual tracks of Hui’s cinema as wu xi wen pai (武戲文拍). Building on Wong’s insight, I propose that Hui also seeks to overcome the barriers between different genres and styles with her bold experimentation of wen xi wu pai (文戲武拍). This wu pai approach exhibits itself less through flaunting the visual spectacles of masculine violence and physical combat than Hui’s cinematic exploration of the persistent fighting spirit transmitted through common folks’, particularly exiled women’s, voices and everyday sound practices. Such an innovative approach to reinventing the book and sword trope threads through Hui’s works in a wide array of genres including crime thrillers, historical dramas, biopics, war epics, and political cinema. This talk studies Hui’s historical cinema with a focus on examining the ways in which its gendered soundscape is animated as the veteran filmmaker’s unique strategy of engaging with and problematizing the long masculinist tradition of the book and sword in Hong Kong cinema.  

About the Speaker:

Hui Faye Xiao is Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Kansas and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture (2014) and Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China: Morning Sun in the Tiny Times (2020). She has also co-edited (with Dr. Ping Zhu) the volume Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics (2021). Currently she is working on a new monograph tentatively titled The Hen Cackles in the Morning: Gendered Soundscape and Female Leadership in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.