ABSTRACT
While manifesting a perceptive awareness for the cinematic phenomenon of overlaps in filmmaking practices between classic Shanghai cinema of the 1930s and late colonial Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s, Stephen Teo’s observation in regards to Shanghai Blues (Shanghai Zhi Ye; dir. Tsui Hark [Xu Ke], 1984) is however inattentive to the intricate complexity therein. My close reading of Shanghai Blues here elaborates on this complexity, in the following related ways.3 First, it takes an intertextual approach to the film – the ways this film (as a text) cites other texts, filmic or otherwise. It will show that the so-called ‘movie brat’ in Tsui, in his capacity as its producer, director and scriptwriter, has in fact done more than merely ‘always evok[ing] or quot[ing] the [Shanghai film] classics of bygone eras’.4 That is to say, the citations have the additional function and consequence of serving up structural and narrative spins, spins that have enabled an otherwise clichéridden film to break away from established norms so that it be felt and seen in some new and original ways.
