Two cities on a celluloid trip

by Tsui Hark’s Shanghai Blues (1984), a Cantonese romantic comedy that pays homage to some of the classics of Shanghai cinema.

The film ties between the two cities dates back to the fathers of Hong Kong cinema — Lai Manwai and Lai Pak-hoi — whose film careers were kick-started in the early 1920s with the help of a Shanghai-based Ukrainian -American named Benjamin Brodsky.

“By the 1950s we were seeing what is known as the first Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema and that would never have happened without Shanghai, and the Shanghai connection in Hong Kong,” says film historian Sam Ho, who is among the experts giving post-screening talks during Archival Gems.

“The skills, the system of production and also the money for Hong Kong film first came down from Shanghai,” Ho adds.

While Archival Gems features films many may have forgotten — or have never known about in the first place — it also presents a chance for contemporary audiences to revisit films featuring Zhou Xuan, one of the greatest stars of Chinese cinema whose life tragically ended in an insane asylum in 1957 when she was just 37.

“She is still relatively wellknown today, chiefly because of her hit records, which have never stopped being reissued and are now almost all available on YouTube,” says film historian Paul Fonoroff.

At the time, Zhou also had the longest film career of any musical star, lasting from the mid-1930s until the early 1950s. The films she starred in “covered just about every genre, from costume drama to musical comedy, and are a good representation of Mandarin-dialect filmmaking in Hong Kong, where many Shanghainese filmmakers had taken refuge during a period of political and economic upheaval within China,” says Fonoroff.

For those who want to watch Zhou in action, Archival Gems features a screening of Orioles Banished from the Flowers (1948), one of her most representative films.