dc.description.abstract | Ann Hui On-Wah, the forefront director of the Hong Kong New Wave, has been working on films for over thirty years and has hitherto accumulated twenty-six films. With her first feature film The Secret (Feng jie, 1979), she impressed Hong Kong film industry for its fresh subject and innovative film style. Her consistent concerns for social issues made her films be appreciated as “products of social conscience” (Teo 150). Film critics in general discuss Ann Hui’s films under two social frames, films made before Summer Snow (1995) are approached as identity search, while those made after for confirming women’s subjectivity. However, this thesis believes that Ann Hui’s films should not be limit to these two approaches, especially when her films made after Summer Snow demonstrate a clear new narrative strategy to centralize the female protagonist in the plot and make good use of spaces so as to address both gender and broader social issues. This thesis discusses Ann Hui’s three films Summer Snow (1995), Goddess of Mercy (2003), The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2005). It focuses on her representation of female protagonists and spaces in each film to lay out Hui’s narrative strategy and the gender and social concerns in each film. This thesis will further argue that Ann Hui’s social critiques are mediated by women’s suffering and trapped situation, directed to modernization of Hong Kong and later China.
Chapter one sees Summer Snow as Ann Hui’s turning point work, revealing her new narrative strategy. This chapter elaborates on Ann Hui’s “cinematics of everyday” to include Ann Hui’s representation of space, which often implies temporal rupture between the old and the new Hong Kong society, dislocating the female protagonists. It shows how the character May is shown to be disoriented in her daily crossing of the domestic and working spaces at the time when Hong Kong was in the process of modernization. The chapter argues that the anxiety caused by the social change from the traditional to the modern is incarnated in May’s sense of loss as she seems to be excluded from both. To Hui, the issue of women’s subjectivity is not merely a gender issue but a social issue at large.
Chapter two examines Goddess of Mercy, Ann Hui’s debut Mainland-Hong Kong coproduction film. This chapter argues that despite the film’s co-production nature and its seemingly action film genre, the film is still about women like Ann Hui’s Summer Snow and her other films. The male genre of Hong Kong action film is adopted to reinforce Ann Hui’s social critique of gender inequality. The film in fact uses heterosexual structure in the traditional Hong Kong gangster film format instead of homo social one to reveal the violence patriarchal ideology inflicts upon women. This chapter reads Goddess of Mercy closely to argue that, by adopting a male genre to tell a story about a woman, Ann Hui is making a strong statement about gender inequality in modern Chinese society. The undercover theme, which critics of The Internal Affair has quickly demonstrated to be related to the issue of identity, is borrowed in the film to emphasize women’s loss of subjectivity. It enables the audience to observe the stereotypes the patriarchal society holds about women. The film not only portrays the hidden patriarchal ideology in An Xin’s relationships with the three men, it also makes the violence that kills her and her child an allegory of what Chinese women quietly suffer every day.
Chapter three looks into Ann Hui’s The Postmodern Life of My Aunt. The film emphasizes the temporal difference between the two stages of China’s modernization from the 60s to the 90s. It “realistically” depicts the protagonist’s life of being trapped in between the modern and the postmodern China. The chapter argues that the film still contains a linear narrative to depict the protagonist as a tragic character with an ambition to pursue a “modern” life in Shanghai as an independent woman but is forced to fall back to being a domestic woman in her “home” at Anshan. Following Linda Hutcheon’s notion of postmodernism, the chapter also argues that the key tag “postmodern” in the film’s title should be understood in this sense as an irony with strong critical power. The Postmodern Life of My Aunt uses postmodern parody to show a woman like Ye is excluded from China’s postmodern drive to globalization and will always falls back to the patriarchal confinement despite her desire to be independent. By calling Ye’s life in Shanghai her “postmodern life” Ann Hui points to the irony of the term and China’s rapid modernization since the 90s.
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