ABSTRACT
Orphan Ling Bo (Jin Chaobai, 1964) is a Taiwanese-language (taiyu) biopic about the eponymous legendary Hong Kong movie star. My unexpected encounter with this film at the National Film Archive in Taipei in the summer of 2006 was a moment of epiphany for me as a film historian in search of a focal point for envisaging a particular historical period. I had set out to canvass the post-1949 Mandarin-language (guoyu) cinema produced on the island to find grounds for comparing the two state-sponsoredMandarin-language cinemas across the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War. Encountering this film presented an opportunity for eye-opening findings, prompting me to change research directions and enabling me to make new historical connections in the Chinese-language film landscape from the intertwined perspectives of orphanhood, stardom and melodrama.
