Once upon a Time in Hong Kong: Intertextuality in Musical Parody as Nostalgia in the Chinese Cinema

Resumo

Beginning with a 1905 recording of Beijing opera, Chinese cinema has developed along distinct industrial trajectories in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Despite a variety of film genres in these regions, the cinema in Hong Kong before the turn of the 21st century is highly characterised with commercialisation that particularly embodies genres of costume drama, action movie, romance, erotica, and especially comedy. These comedies often blend classic texts, period costuming, fairy tales, and star personae with the ‘nonsense’ style, mobilizing irony, satire, and parody while referencing contemporary figures and concerns. However, after this typical filmmaking fashion established since the 1980s becomes unpopular after the millennium year, recurring screenings of such comedy films on contemporary streaming media mark a bygone era that has been captured as nostalgic sentimentality for a typical generation of Chinese audiences. This paper aims to inspect the intertextuality of parody through musical and visual presentation in Chinese cinema, as well as to attempt tracing how musical parody is employed in two costume comedies, The Eagle Shooting Heroes and Chinese Odyssey 2002, in order to illuminate a trajectory of nostalgia among Chinese audience. With micro-analysis rendered on selected film clips, a comparison of hypertext and hypotext is presented to illustrate multifaceted contexts in the audio and the visuals. The discussion traces “good old times” nostalgia, particularly among Chinese millennials, and considers what these films suggest about the prospects of musical parody in the Sinosphere, alongside the post-2000 decline of the costume comedy genre.