4 Centre Stage: A Shadow in Reverse

Bérénice Reynaud

Maggie Cheung, star of Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage, ° Ruan Lingyu is not alive (ut Maggie Cheung is).
won a Silver Bear at the 1991 Berlin Film Festival, + Ruan Lingyu did not live in Hong Kong (ut she
the first Chinese actress to receive such an award. A spoke Cantonese).
few months later, the director's 146-minute cut was * Ruan Lingyu is not a man (ut she is an object
reduced to less than two hours for commercial release of desire and/or identification for male homo-
in Hong Kong.' This partial invisibility is poignant, sexuals),
for Centre Stage revolves around the search for the ;
missing image of legendary star, Ruan Lingyu, most Such identification maps out a space allowing for
of whose films have disappeared.” It is also a queer analysis. As a female spectator with a vested
metaphor for another form of hindered vision: the interest in the representation of women, I conduct
image is there, but not seen. The second unseen image _ this analysis within the framework of contemporary
is that of the Chinese queer subject.> gender and feminist film theory. First, I examine how
Stanley Kwan ‘came out’ through his documen- the figure of Ruan/Cheung is constructed through
tary, Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (1996). _ the cinematic equivalent of Freud’s fort-da mechan-
Since then, he has directed performances, another ism. Then I follow how, in the Republican era, ‘the
documentary (4 Personal Memoir of Hong Kong, immoral woman’ and ‘the homosexual’ were sub-
1997) and feature films (Hold You Tight, 1998; Island jected to similar rebukes, ejecting them from what
Tales, 1999; Lan Yu, 2001) with gay themes and/or _ was socially acceptable in Chinese culture. Finally, I
characters. In the context of the frequent denial of _ decipher the interplay of identification and objectifi-
real homosexual practices in Chinese culture, Kwan’s cation that connects male subjectivity to the figure of
courageous assertion of his sexuality was of para- the ‘suffering woman’ through the double process of
mount importance. It has allowed a number of queer denial and displacement described by Tania Mod-
analyses of the work he has completed since 1996, _ leski: ‘the male finds it necessary to repress certain
but so far this has not extended to his earlier films.* “feminine” aspects of himself, and to project these ...
Until the late 1990s, there were virtually no sym- _ onto the woman, who does the suffering for both of
pathetic or realistic representations of homosexuals in them.” a =e
Hong Kong cinema. Like the left-wing Shanghai RUA
film-makers who got round Japanese censorship by’ RUAN LINGYUIS NOT ALI
inserting coded allusions, gay directors like Kwan ‘experim: iopic’, Centre Stage recounts
resorted to metaphors and double entendre to suggest ____>ts of the life and legend of Ruan Lingyu. One
an alternative reading. The most effective strategy in _ of the most famous Shanghai silent cinema stars, she
Centre Stage is inspired by Foucault's ‘reverse dis- _ made her first film at the age of sixteen, and com-
course’ that duplicates and subverts ‘the same vocab- mitted suicide at twenty-five on 8 March 1935 —
ulary, the same categories by which [homosexuality _ International Women's Day — after being attacked by
is] disqualified’ and rendered invisible.» The denials _ the media about her relationships with the bankrupt
that structure the film are therefore also double enten- family scion, Zhang Damin, and the wealthy tea
dre asserting simultaneously one thing and its opposite merchant, Tang Jishan.
-‘I know very well, but . ..’ Three such denials can Centre Stage's fragmented texture intertwines fic-
be identified: tional reconstructions of Ruan’s life with black-and-
 CHINESE FILMS IN FOCys
32

white video interviews with survivors from the icon. In turn, her resistance fuels the film’s unspoken
Golden Age of the Shanghai studios and Ruan’s suggestion: isn’t a man better equipped to incarnate
biographer, as well as the cast and crew of the con- Ruan Lingyu?
temporary film; excerpts of footage from still-extant Centre Stage’s first narrative sequence takes place
films; reconstructions of scenes from lost films; pro- in an all-male bathhouse. The camera glides sensu-
duction stills; and photographs. This mise en abyme ously over the bodies of half-naked men getting mas-
allows several Ruan Lingyus to co-exist, diffracting saged, smoking and talking. In Yang : Yin, Kwan
her image to the point of vertigo. Here she appears as identifies this moment as a ‘marker’ of his homosex-
Maggie Cheung, there in her role as The Goddess uality, adding: ‘the person who first took me to a
(Wu Yonggang, 1934), here again in Cheung’s re- bathhouse was my father.’ However, Kwan also
creation of the same sequence of The Goddess, and acknowledges ‘wo patterns of queer identification,
finally in black-and-white pictures taken on her One is defined by the search for intimacy with an
deathbed. To ‘capture’ the elusive ‘essence’ of the star, older man, the other by his love for gender-bending
Kwan stages several ‘mirror scenes’ such as the performances in Cantonese opera (starring women
moment when Ruan stands alone at night, gazing at playing male roles), where his mother took him. The
her diffracted reflection. She holds the bowl of congee bathhouse sequence unfolds between allusions to
that we have seen her pour two bottles of sleeping these two ‘founding moments’.
pills into. Under the shimmering seduction of First, defore she appears on the screen, the fic-
appearances, Kwan weaves a dialectic between the tional Ruan is already constructed as a figure of speech
visible and the invisible. He playfully uses cinema to to be passed between a chorus of men. The narrative part
indulge in a grown-up game of what Freud called of the film is book-ended by two such choruses. To
fort—da’ (‘gone-there’), after the exclamations of a the brotherly banter of the beginning corresponds to
little boy throwing and recovering a cotton reel to re- the film-makers’ bonding around Ruan’s deathbed.
enact and master his mother’s departure.’ Now you The imaginary brotherhood of Shanghai film-
see Ruan Lingyu, now you don't - or maybe a little makers is tightly knit first by passing Ruan on from
bit of her, a reflection, a copy, or a trace: mise en scéne film to film then through the death of ‘their’
creates a symbolic control over the appearance and common star.
disappearance of the object of desire. Second, Kwan introduces a disruptive element:
‘Cinema, like the fort-da game, constitutes itself an unnamed young man sashays into the discussion
as a continually renewed search for a lost plenitude’, of Ruan’s acting abilities. Assuming the comical role
writes Mary Ann Doane, analysing Gilda (Charles of ‘the sissy’, he offers himself as the melodramatic
Vidor, 1946)® — a film with barely disguised homo- lead for Wayside Flowers (Sun Yu, 1930), in case
sexual overtones.’ The questions are: Whose loss? ‘Ruan is not up to scratch’. Rebutted, he replies ‘Tl
Whose plenitude? And at whose expense? Both go compare sizes with the others’. On the one hand, *
Gilda and Centre Stage stage the punishment of their he suggests that he could be a better female imperson-
heroines by wounded and flawed males (Gilda’s two ator than Ruan. On the other, he reasserts his man-
husbands, Ruan's two lovers). In Centre Stage this also hood through both his desire to look at other men’s
generates a friendly rivalry between the director and penises and the existence of his own member. This
his star based on the tacit question, who will benefit brief exchange gives an edge to Kwan and Cheung’s
most from identification with Ruan Lingyu? later conversation, when they good-naturedly
com-
Cheung first appears as herself, while offscreen pete to impersonate Ruan. An acknowledged direc-
Kwan asks if she hopes to be remembered in fifty tor of melodrama (wenyi pian), Kwan mimics her
years. She replies, ‘If people do, it'll be different from saddest poses, while, as a modern young
woman,
Ruan, because she is remembered when she was at Cheung reproduces her happy smile in The Peach Gir
the pinnacle of her success, She’s become a legend.’ (Bu Wancang, 1931).
In his desire to use Cheung as a ‘medium’ to access Some men, gay and straight, think the construc-
the dead star, Kwan seeks overlaps between her and tion of femininity is too serious a
business to be left
Ruan and to involve her in the (re)construction of to women. This attitude may be best exemplified
her character. Yet Cheung refuses to be seen as an by
the tradition of female impersonators
(Auadans) in
CENTRE STAGE
33

Peking opera following a 1772 law barring women

utters a mock feminist statement about Women’s
from the stage. The cognoscenti believed that the
Day, Tang protests: ‘You women have arisen, whereas
exquisite essence of femininity conveyed by the
we men have fallen.’
huadans was superior to anything a ‘real woman’
Later, Tang falls on the polished floor. Angrily
could do. Centre Stage poses the question of female refusing a helping hand, he screams, ‘She’s my mis-
impersonation (by men and women) in a way that tress!’, while Ruan continues to dance alone.
denotes a queer sensibility in ‘the awareness of the Cheung’s exuberant yet dreamlike dancing is spec-
social constructedness of sex roles’,!® the suspicion tacular, seeming to express Ruan’s silent jouissance — a
that ‘gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that Jouissance beyond the phallus, ‘proper to her and of
passes as the real’, or the discovery, as Kwan aptly which herself may know nothing, except that she
coins it in Yang + Yin, that ‘gender need not be a experiences it’.!° However, what Cheung imitates is
boundary, but can also be a game’. Also queer is the not the body language of the dead star, but that of
implicit assumption that too-much-femininity may Stanley Kwan, who had felt the need to demonstrate
be a mask over masculinity, as in the case of Joan the appropriate movements,” yielding to the pleas-
Riviere’s patient.!? ure of ‘dancing like Ruan Lingyu’. Kwan’s perform-
Examples of femininity-as-masquerade abound ance, covered over by the glamour of his star, was
in the film. When future star Chen Yanyan tells nevertheless a way to experience ‘the suicidal ecstasy
Cheung/Ruan she has heard that in Peiping ‘it takes of being a woman’ which Leo Bersani identifies as a
you an hour to do one eyebrow’, Cheung splendidly component of male gay jouissance.!” By inter-cutting
replies, ‘in Harbin, it took me two hours’. The ges- the party sequence with shots of the wake, Kwan fur-
ture of carefully painting an eyebrow over a face ther intimates that the whole ‘act’ gave its performer
reduced to a blank canvas invokes the make-up ses- such intense pleasure that only death could follow,
sions of the Auadan. In their stylised femininity, did again closely linking it to male masochism.
not the actresses of Shanghai’s Golden Age try to While he stages the performance of femininity as
compete with the Auadans who had displaced their a contest between women and gay men, Kwan also
forebears? Filmic realism demanded ‘an authentic views it as an essential component of the impasse sex-
object called “woman’” — to be seem, and then “known” uelle between women and straight men. Whether
and “had”’.!> But where did these bodies copy their contained and fabricated by the codes of acting or
version of the feminine from? gender roles, or produced to excess as a covert form
Ruan is also shown to face the double bind of of retaliation and resistance, femininity is perceived
fashion and male authority. As she and Tang Jishan by straight men as a challenge.
are being sued for ‘adultery’ by her previous lover Against the grain of his noted sensual film-
Zhang Damin, Tang ponders how he should dress to making, Kwan depicts Ruan’s affairs as devoid of
go to court. ‘I’ll wear a dark suit and a green tie to intimate sensuality; their physicality is reduced to
match that new dress of yours ... . 1 want all Shang- male hysteria from Zhang Damin, abuse from Tang
hai to know that we are high class adulterers’, he says. Jishan and emotional withdrawal from Cai
Ruan replies, ‘I live with you, knowing you're mar- Chusheng. Over-evaluated and fetishised, Ruan can’t
ried. I admit being a loose woman. What we wear be ‘possessed’ by boorish men who don't ‘deserve’ her.
wouldn’t make a difference.’ Tang slaps her twice. That husbands and lovers tend to abuse, mistreat and
Later, when a friend invites her to a party that demean ‘woman’ is a widespread queer belief — as
night, Ruan replies, ‘Then I must look my best Aad seen in the cult of Judy Garland.!® Femininity is too
and extends her hand to Tang in a conciliatory ges- serious a business to be left to heterosexuals.
ture. However, the tension between them resurfaces
at the party when Ruan, dazzling in a superb RUAN LINGYU DID NOT LIVE IN
cheongsam, uses the very codes of feminine masquer- HONG KONG
ade he’s imposed upon her to upstage him, This is a By asking a famous Hong Kong star to embody
strategy of ‘self-parody’ Doane identifies as ‘double Ruan Lingyu, Kwan ‘reclaims’ her by stressing her
mimesis’.4 A bit tipsy, Ruan kisses all the men, Cantonese origins. Like the modern Cheung in her
speaks too much and dances without restraint. As she conversations with Kwan, her fellow actors and the
 34 CHINESE FILMS IN FOCcus

crew, Ruan speaks Cantonese at home. She uses fessionalism in the industry and well-orchestrated
Shanghainese for mundane exchanges and to talk publicity campaigns turning movie stars into media
with director Bu Wancang, while trying to master darlings. Escaping her working-class background,
Mandarin when speaking to actresses Chen Yanyan Ruan attained a glamorous lifestyle — once the priyj-
and Li Lili, Kwan’s oeuvre is thoroughly informed by lege of imperial courtesans, who had been down-
a sense of fractured Chinese identity, leading to the graded to prostitutes as movie stars now entertained
intimate dialectic between Hong Kong and Shang- the new urban elites.”4
hai in the ‘nostalgic trilogy’ formed by Centre Stage, Ina telling moment, Ruan is at home, rehearsing
Rouge (1988) and Red Rose White Rose (1994). the role of the prostitute in The Goddess, smoking and
Rouge starts with a close-up of Anita Mui (as the striking semi-lascivious poses to inhabit her charac-
courtesan Fleur) carefully making up her face, and ter. As Tang arrives, she blows smoke in his face and
Segues into a scene in which she sings Cantonese imitates the streetwalker’s gait. Tang asks if this is her
opera in male drag, under the fascinated gaze of a true self. Unruffled, she whispers, ‘If Miss Liang
young brothel patron. After committing suicide — on upstairs and I were whores, tell me, who would you
the same date, yet one year earlier, than Ruan?? - pick?’ The situation might be fictional, yet the anxi-
Fleur returns as a ghost fifty-three years later in 1987 ety was not, for Tang is depicted as a womaniser.
Hong Kong. It is in New Women (Cai Chusheng, 1934), where
Red Rose White Rose is an adaptation by noted she is cast as Wei Ming, an intellectual who resorts
queer writer and artist Edward Lam, who later wrote to prostitution to buy medicine for her daughter, that
Yang + Yin's voice-over, of a novella by Eileen Chang the thin wall between ‘acting’ and ‘being’ collapses.
~a cult figure among Chinese intellectuals, especially The object of a slanderous media campaign much
but not exclusively, in queer circles. Set in 1930s like Ruan herself, Wei Ming commits suicide, but on
Shanghai, the story explores the relationships of a her hospital bed she has a last surge of energy and
selfish Chinese businessman, Zhenbao, with two vows to live. The scene completed, Ruan/Cheung
women, his mistress, the passionate adulteress Jiaorui cries uncontrollably under the sheets. Cai
and his wife, the masochist Yanli. Chusheng/Tony Leung stands uncomfortably by the
Nostalgia in these films has been thoroughly bed. Kwan steps in: ‘You forgot to lift the sheet to
analysed,?° but I will focus on its queer connotations, look at Maggie.’ Who forgot? The fictional Cai? The
following Russo's interpretation of the longings Hong Kong actor? While a beautiful woman crying
expressed by cross-dressing Queen Christina (Rouben for the camera is an object of specular consumption,
Mamoulian, 1933) as ‘a nostalgia for something [gay an excess of sobbing is potentially obscene, for it
people] had never seen on screen’. Similarly, Kwan's threatens the boundaries of the acting profession. So,
investigation of Chinese cinema history in Yang + Yin an actress playing a prostitute may think she’s
articulated a longing for a symbolic space within pan- become one. Maybe it is better not to look. Now you
Chinese culture that would allow queer desire to see her, when she’s a star, now you don’t, when she’s
unfold. However, this longing proves painfully con- a tart.
tradictory, as homosexuality had been ‘marked’ as un- In the 1930s, ‘movie actresses ... were still placed
Chinese. .. on this prostitute-courtesan continuum [that]
In spite of a classical Chinese homosexual tra- gave them ambiguous status’> and put Ruan in the
dition, colonial Hong Kong and Republican Shang- constant risk of ‘falling’. Kwan shows her obsessed by
hai perceived homosexuality as a ‘recent importation the fear that people may not perceive her as a ‘good
from the decadent West ... . going against traditional woman’. His ‘nostalgic trilogy’ creates an association
Chinese moral concepts’.?” Moreover, ‘prostitution between sexual subjects traditionally thought of as
and sodomy represented the two forms of non-pro- ‘bad’: the courtesan in Rouge, the foreign-born adul-
creative sex which needed to be eliminated for the teress in Red Rose White Rose and the actress in
sake of the family and the nation’. Centre Stage. Gliding along this chain, Kwan hides a
When Ruan Lingyu started acting in 1926, film fourth term, providing a hint with the bathhouse
actresses were equated with loose women and prosti- ‘sissy’. As much the object of social reprobation as the
tutes. This changed in the 1930s, with increased pro- prostitute, as ‘influenced by foreign mores’ as the
 CENTRE STAGE

Centre Stage: Maggie Cheung as Ruan Lingyu

overseas woman, as vulnerable to gossip as the movie stories about somewhere else’,”® the ‘negative hallu-
star, is the homosexual in Chinese society. cination (not seeing what is there)’ facilitates the
Public discourse in the Republican era equally queer strategy of now you show it, now you don't.
condemned the prostitute, the socially mobile The moralising discourse of the 1930s ‘was meant to
woman and the ‘sodomite’. While often coupled with exclude and delegitimise anyone who might become
left-wing politics, the upsurge of nationalism caused ... influential through the medium of film — [a goal
by the war also gave way to xenophobic tendencies. achieved] via the trope of “woman”’.”? It attacked
It was believed that in treaty ports contacts with for- film actresses to take aim at an ineluctable moder-
eigners put prostitutes at greater risk of disease,7° nity. By reversing the trope, a gay director may also
while young men were exposed to seduction by reverse the exclusion. You thought you saw the vic-
Western perverts. . timisation of a woman — while I showed you the
Already out of place in 1930s Shanghai, the queer trials of a gay man.
subject is neither here nor there, but has instead the
RUAN LINGYU IS NOT A MAN
tragic freedom to glide between worlds like a ghost.
And yet Maggie Cheung triumphantly and effort-
So Kwan can jump between 1934 and 1987, collaps-
lessly wins the contest with Kwan. As he fights as a
ing Hong Kong into Shanghai in Rouge” or creating
director does with his star, he also gives her literally
a scintillating game of equivalences between 1930s
‘room to breathe’, for example when the camera cap-
Shanghai and 1990s Hong Kong in Centre Stage.
tures her breathing on the fictional Ruan’s deathbed,
For, if ‘stories about Hong Kong always turned into
 CHINESE FILMS IN FOCYs
36

and then sitting up laughing. However, this perpet- [as] an everyday issue, whether in terms of Passing ag
ual oscillation between different sides of the rep- straight [or], signaling gayness in coming out ., ’34
resentation was hard on Cheung: “To play Ruan Although Ruan’s female masquerade is mostly per-
Lingyu, Stanley and I agreed on one thing ... she formed for the benefit of men, Kwan throws clues
had to wear a mask at all time .... So I find my that subvert this reading. When Ruan and Chen
acting a little fake, hieratic .... Stanley wanted this Yanyan discuss make-up, they achieve a subtle bond-
alienation effect, he wanted representation to be vis- ing, ‘which demonstrates the masquerade’s potential
ible as a process.” to draw women closer together and to function ag
However, the effectiveness of Cheung’s presence non-verbal homoerotic expression’.”? In several
in the film goes beyond mere equivalence to Ruan. instances, Ruan is seen dancing with other young
Like the xiuyang (mystique) of the Shanghai actresses, with whom she seems freer and more at
actresses of the 1930s, her charisma retains its ease than with men. At the final party, however, she
opacity. So far, literature on the fascination of gay theatrically overplays her heterosexuality by loudly
men for female movie stars has been limited to the announcing she ‘won't kiss the girls’.
West: Garbo, Dietrich or Garland. There is no such Another clue occurs when Ruan interviews
scholarship on the cult of Ruan. About one hundred another actress about the pain of childbirth — some-
thousand mourners attended her funeral,*! and some thing she dnows she will never experience herself ~
young men committed suicide.** However, ‘the and explains her decision to adopt a little girl,
majority of these mourners were women, especially Xiaoyu. Thus, the family composed of Ruan, her
female students’.*3 So, what does this say about the mother, Xiaoyu, and first lover Zhang Damin resem-
young men who ‘adored Ruan? At this stage, bles a gay household. Zhang plays the role of a kept
nothing. The queer subject was not only invisible, but lover and Ruan, who keeps writing expenses in her
he was also silent. ledger, is the responsible breadwinner. This role
If the cult of certain movie stars has become a reversal continues throughout, with Ruan taking
code of recognition for gay men in the West, has more ‘masculine’ responsibilities: she ‘directs’ her
Ruan Lingyv’s played a similar role in contemporary partner Li Lili in a crucial scene in Little Toys (Sun
Hong Kong? Yang + Yin lists some of the denials Yu, 1933), convinces Bu Wancang to let her play a
encountered by Kwan when tracking down possible more socially conscious role, and asks director Cai
signs of queerness in Chinese cinema: ‘I’ve never Chusheng to elope with her. While humouring Tang
taken Brigitte Lin as anything but female’ (film Jishan by pretending to be his kept mistress, she was
archivist Law Kar); ‘You cannot project modern atti- actually financially independent.°*°
tudes onto the friendship between two Peking opera The mechanism of identification with a female
actors’ (Chen Kaige, director of Farewell My Concu- actress/character by a male subject is complex,
bine); ‘We Chinese see this kind of relationship dif- especially for films that foreground female suffering.
ferently from Westerners’ (veteran director Xie Jin); The subjective position of the gay man complicates
‘No Chinese reader thinks of homosexuals when he matters further, for his ‘denial of the feminine’ differs
reads Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ (martial-arts from that of the male heterosexual subject. His
film director Chang Che). At the core of these ambivalence toward femininity is best exemplified by
denials is a suspicion of Western-induced modernity, the ‘bifurcated position’ of the bathhouse ‘sissy’
which ejects the queer subject outside ‘Chinese cul- (identification, competition and phallocentrism).
ture’. On the other hand, woman is marginalised as a Moreover, queer subjects are often faced with a situ-
subject, but as a figure of speech, she is at the centre of ation unknown to heterosexuals: the impossibility of
the discourse on the effects of modernity. So the identifying with a mirror image on the screen, where
female movie star, as the site of multiple contradic- they are only constructed as absent. To draw a paral-
tions, provides the Chinese queer subject with a lel with other misrepresented minorities, how is the
possible anchor for identification. Chinese queer subject ‘sutured into a place that
Centre Stage explores many avenues through includes [him] only as a term of negation? What does
which this identification is possible. The issue of [he] identify with when his own mirror image is
mask is central for gay men, who view ‘performance structurally absent or present only as an Other?’ This
 CENTRE STAGE
37

could be the explanation for James Baldwin's ‘adoles- Ruan Lingyu, who, in turn, thought she was Maggie
cent identification with Bette Davis’,>” since images Cheung. Or it may be the story of a modern Hong
of black gay men were unavailable onscreen,
Kong actress who is asked to play a star of the past,
Reading Lacan, Kaja Silverman stresses that it is as the latter discovers that she was only ‘playing’ at
through fantasy that the subject learns both how to
being Ruan Lingyu. ‘Truth’ lies in this interplay of
- desire and to build an identity. The two are ‘com- surfaces and trompe l'oeil, this collage of eras, cities,
plexly imbricated’ through ‘the insertion of the sub- genres and media, this hall of mirrors in which
ject into a particular syntax or tableau’, so the subject identity is many times diffracted and only exists as
can only exist if under the gaze of the Other, as well seduction.
while ‘assuming a position within the mise en scene of
desire’°® A subject whose desiring identity keeps
NOTES
being denied and/or rendered invisible has no other 1. This essay is based on the director's cut.
recourse than to project himself into a specular fan- 2. Kwan mentions ten films, five of them ‘lost’. Since
tasy. While there are many avenues to queerness, 1991, four other films starring Ruan have been
including those far removed from feminine identifi- recovered.
cation, recent scholarship has focused on the femini- 3. Chinese lesbian representation is beyond the scope of
sation that overplayed male theatricality entails: this essay. Here, I refer to the ‘Chinese queer subject’
‘masquerading as a man’ feminises the ‘macho’ in the masculine only.
wearer's relation to the costume.°? These analyses 4. Existing texts on Centre Stage include: Natalia Chan
strengthen Silverman's thesis that ‘woman seem[s] to Shui Hung, ‘Memory, Gender, History: Female
function at times not only as the focus of gay identi- Sensitivity and Queer Spectatorship of Stanley Kwan's
fication, but as the pivot of gay desire’.“° Films’ (Jiyi, Xingbie, Lishi: Lun Guan Jin-peng
What is more problematic — and interesting — is Dianying di Nuxingchujue yu Kuyiguanzhao) in City
the internalisation by the queer subject of this femi- on the Edge of Time: Gender, Special Effect, and the 1997
nine mise en scene. Of the variety of ways this Politics of Hong Kong Cinema (Shengshi di Bianyuan:
phenomenon has been analysed, the one that con- Xianggang Dianying di Xingbie, Teji, yu Jiugt Zhengzhi)
cerns us here is narcissistic object-choice of ‘what (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43-72;
[the subject] once was’ and/or ‘someone who was Cui Shugin, ‘Stanley Kwan's Center Stage: The
once part of himself’,*? a process made more com- (Im)possible Engagement between Feminism and
plex by the congruence between object of desire and Postmodernism’, Cinema Journal, 39, no. 4 (2000):
object of identification. Identification and desire rest 60-80; various essays in Stanley Kwan:La Via Orientale
on the loss of both the little boy that the subject once al Melodrama, ed. Giovanni Spagnoletti, Alessandro
was — and his mother loved — and the first object he Bori and Olaf Méller (Pesaro: Fondazione Pesaro
ever lost — his mother. Nuovo Cinema/II Castoro, 2000); and Julian Stringer,
Ruan Lingyu, the lost object par excellence of Chi- ‘Centre Stage: Reconstructing the Bio-Pic’,
nese cinema, becomes a stand-in for all these losses. Cinemaction, no. 42 (1997): 28-39. Queer analyses of
By mourning her, Kwan identifies with the main- Kwan's work include Helen Hok-Sze Leung, ‘A Time
stream Chinese culture that outlaws his queerness; to Dance: Stanley Kwan's Queer Fable of 1997 Past’
with the community of film-makers, husbands, and (paper presented at the After the End— Hong Kong
lovers that used her ‘glamour value’ to strengthen their Culture After 1997 conference, UCLA, 26 May 2001;
Yau Ching, ‘Bisexuality and Duality in Hold You Tight’,
male bonds; and with all the Chinese gay men and
Cinedossier: The 35th Golden Horse Award-Winning
women that secretly identify with her. By mourning
Films (Taipei: National Film Archive, 1999), 116-122.
her, he also mourns himself— what he never was, what
he has lost without even ever possessing it. 5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New
York: Vintage Books, 1980), 101.
The pleasure caused by Centre Stage stems from
6. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much
Kwan’s ability to simultaneously play on several reg-
(London: Methuen, 1988), 13.
isters - while anchoring himself in the wenyt pian
‘melodrama’ tradition. Centre Stage may be the story 7. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New
York: Norton, 1961), 8-9.
of a female impersonator who thought s/he was
 CHINESE FILMS IN FOCUs
38

93, Frank Dikétter: Sex, Culture and Modernity in Ching

8, Mary Ann Doane, ‘Gilda: Epistemology as Strip- (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995),
Routledge, 1991),
Tease’, Femmes Fatales (London: 37.
102.
24. hii ‘The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful’, 150,
Harper &
9. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (New York:
25. Ibid., 157.
Row, 1987), 78-79.
26. Dikitter, Sex, Culture and Modernity, 127-130.
10. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies (New York: St
27. Lee, Shanghai Modern, 335.
Martin’s Press, 1986), 178.
Routledge, 28. Abbas, Hong Kong, 25.
1 . Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London:
29. Chang, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful’, 140,
1999), xxviii.
Inner 30. Libération, 4 December 1999, interview with J. M.
12. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, The
Lalanne.
World and Joan Riviere (London: Karnac Books, 291.
31, Harris, ‘The New Woman Incident’,
1991), 90-101.
32, Shu Kei, ‘La légende de Ruan Lingyw’, in Le Cinéma
13. Michael G. Chang, ‘The Good, the Bad and the
Chinois, ed. Marie Claire Quiquemelle and Jean-
Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in
Loup Passek (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,
Shanghai, 1920s-1930s’, in Cinema and Urban Culture
in Shanghai 1922-1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang, 1984), 149-154.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 129. 33. Chang, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful’, 297,
14. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: note 88.
Indiana University Press, 1987), 181. 34. Richard Dyer, Believing in Fairies: the Author and
15. Jacques Lacan, ‘God and the Jouissance of He the Homosexual’, in Inside Out, ed. Diana Fuss
Woman’, in Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and (London: Routledge, 1991), 188.
Jacqueline Rose (London: Norton, 1982), 145. 35. Chris Strayer, ‘The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in
16. Interview with Kwan, April 1997. Narrative Feature Film’, in Multiple Voices in Feminist
17. Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, October, no. 43 Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar and
(1987): 212. Janice R. Welsch (Minneapolis: University of
18. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 141-194. Minnesota Press, 1994), 351.
19. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong, Culture and the Politics of 36. Chang, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful’, 297,
Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota note 93.
Press, 1997), 45. 37. Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, ‘De Margin and De
20. Ibid., 39-47; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern Center’, Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 9.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 38. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins
335-338; Kristine Harris ‘The New Woman Incident’, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6-7.
in Transnational Chinese Cinemas, ed. Sheldon Hsiao- 39. See, in particular, Jamie Gough, ‘Theories of Sexual
peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, Identities and the Masculinization of the Gay Man’,
1997), 198; Rey Chow, ‘A Souvenir of Love’, in At in Coming on Strong: Gay Politics and Culture, ed.
Full Speed, ed. Esther C. M. Yau (Minneapolis: Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis (London: Unwin,
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 209-229. 1989), 121.
21. Russo, Celluloid Closet, 66. 40. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 355.
22. Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve (Berkeley: 41. Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, General
University of California Press, 1990), 165. Psychological Theory (New York: Collier, 1963), 71.