To Kill the Love

The title gives the impression of a film noir when it is none other than a melodrama, the most popular genre in Cantonese cinema, adapted from Yee Hung-sang's serial novel in Sing Pao Daily News. Polygamy, particularly polygamy of a man taking two sisters in marriage simultaneously, was fairly commonplace in 1930s and 40s. What is unusual but significant about this ménage à trois is that the women played by Pak Yin and Tsang Nam-sze are modern and educated and the husband a free spirit who fights for independence, away from his family and Confucian values in the spirit of May Fourth. The paradigmatic statement of this escape from home was expressed for May Fourth intellectuals in a Western literary text – Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House – and further pondered by Lu Xun in his speech, ‘What Happens after Nora Leaves Home?'. Sadly, China's culture and economy offered extremely barren soil for cultivating an independent female identity and autonomy, while post-war Cantonese cinema had a penchant for representing men as feminised beings, feeble and fragile. Progress, as it transpired, was a hard-fought battle in which both women and men trudged through fields of mud, each step more cumbersome than the last.

Date	Time	Venue
26/3/2017 (Sun)	5:30pm	Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive
1/4/2017 (Sat)#	2:00pm	Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive

# To follow with seminar

The contents of the programme do not represent the views of the presenter. The presenter reserves the right to change the programme should unavoidable circumstances make it necessary.