ABSTRACT
If the historical subject of youth has been deconstructed to different degrees in the first two chapters, then the following three chapters explore possibilities of re-making the subject of youth, or youths in the plural, perceived from different perspectives and reconstituted in different narratives, genres and media. Chapter Four turns to study the transmedial cross-fertilization of music, small-screen video culture, and youth cinema. Often hybridized with other genres such as time travel, romance, bio pic, war epic and so on, the youth-oriented films examined in this chapter all manifest a strong sense of sonic nostalgia. While a slew of high-grossing Chinese summer blockbusters suffuse their soundtracks with Cantopop numbers of the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong filmmakers often recycle Mandarin Chinese revolutionary songs and traditional and model operas in their recent works. Of course, this cross-referencing and transmedial intertextuality could be understood as post-Fordist marketing gimmicks. However, I also argue, through re-mixing pop, rock, and operas from different ages and spaces, filmmakers of different generations and localities resort to mediated prosthetic memories to construct a border-crossing and time-traveling network of revolutionary youths embedded in diverse linguistic, musical, and political milieus.
