Once upon a time in Hong Kong: intertextuality in musical parody as nostalgia in the Chinese cinema

Hong Kong cinema before the turn of the 21st century is highly characterized by commercialization that particularly embodies genres of costume drama, action movie, romance, erotica, as well as comedy. In the latter, the complexity of cinema as a storytelling medium is heightened when classic works, ancient costumes, fairy tales, and movie stars paradoxically blend with a ‘nonsense’ [无厘头] style filled with irony, satire, or parody, while making references to figures or issues of modern times. However, after this typical filmmaking style, established since the 1980s, became unpopular after the millennium, recurring screenings of such comedy films on contemporary streaming media mark a bygone era, evoking nostalgic sentimentality among a typical generation of Chinese audiences. Drawing on theories of parody and intertextuality, this paper aims to inspect the intertextuality of parody through audio-visual presentation in Chinese cinema, as well as to attempt tracing how musical parody is employed in two selected comedies, namely The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993) and Chinese Odyssey 2002 (2002), in order to illuminate a trajectory of nostalgia among the Chinese audience. With micro-analysis applied to selected film clips, a comparison of hypertext and hypotext is presented to illustrate the multifaceted contexts of the audio and visuals. The result reveals two modes of parody originally theorized in relation to music videos that, in the selected films, produce humor through adaptation, incongruity, exaggeration, and playful recontextualization. It further opens up the possibility of reconsidering musical parody as a rhetorical and compositional strategy in contemporary film music.

Text 127469.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB) Official URL or Download Paper: https://revistas.ufg.br/musica/article/view/84997

Actions (login required)

View Item