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.5 In addition to the industrial dimension of film productionwhat also needs to be considered is the extent to which the classical par-adigm of film-making is taken as a major influence in the formal andstylistic process of film production.The majority of popular films out-side Hollywood do organise time and space through the parameters setout by the classical paradigm.The rule of narrative economy, causalityand the system of continuity editing perfected in the early period of theHollywood studio era was, and perhaps still is, in Miriam Hansen sterm, the first global vernacular.6 What is essentially being adopted bypopular film production outside Hollywood during this period is boththe industrial and aesthetic models of film-making established in thestudio era as the relationship between a mode of production and formaland stylistic convention.7Before the ascendancy of the martial arts film in the mid-1960s,Hong Kong cinema was dominated by the melodrama and the musicalas the two key genre trends of the Mandarin studios.The musical genrein Hong Kong cinema also accounts for a number of variations and sub-genres that include melodramas which feature songs (It s Always Spring(Evan Yang, HK, 1962), Love Without End (Doe Chin, HK, 1961)); tra-ditional Mandarin huangmei diao or yellow plum operas (Love Eterne(Li Han-hsiang, HK, 1963), Kingdom and the Beauty (Li Han-hsiang,HK, 1959), Maid From Heaven (Ho Meng-hua, HK, 1963)); the south-ern Cantonese opera films (The Gold Braided Fan (Jiang Weiguang,HK, 1959), The Swallow s Message (Zhu Ji, HK, 1959)); and the focus 03 EA Cinema_041-056 25/1/08 09:14 Page 4444 East Asian Cinemasof this chapter, the contemporary Hollywood style musicals (MamboGirl (Wen Yi, HK, 1957), The Wild Wild Rose (Wang Tianlin, HK,1960), Because of Her (Wang Tianlin, HK, 1963), Love Parade (DoeChin, HK, 1963), Hong Kong Nocturne (Umetsugu Inoue, HK, 1966)).The genre also incorporates a range of musical influences and traditionsincluding Western and Chinese opera, jazz, classical and mambo, aswell as the important legacy of the musical and nightclub cultures of1930s Shanghai.Wang Tianlin s The Wild Wild Rose incorporatesnearly all of these musical influences, and is inspired in equal amountsby Bizet s opera Carmen and The Blue Angel (Germany, 1930), withMarlene Dietrich.The Shanghai influence also, with its own set of con-nections with Hollywood, should be considered a cultural influence ofthe contemporary formation of the Hong Kong musical, and althoughit is not discussed here is a logical link in the history of musical filmproduction and Mandarin popular song between Shanghai, Hong Kongand Hollywood.The majority of contemporary musicals, and the best examples of theHollywood influenced genre, were produced between 1957 and 1964 bythe MP&GI studio.The Shaw Brothers did produce a significant num-ber of contemporary musicals in order to compete with their rival stu-dio, but their musicals exhibited less commitment towards the genre sexploration of Hong Kong s modernity and the space of the city thanit was an exercise to simply compete with MP&GI s innovation withthe genre.Shaw Brothers real focus during the musical phase was onthe period huangmei diao opera musical films, with their cultural rootsand commitment firmly located in a cinematic fantasy of pre-commu-nist mythical China.The huangmei diao films are in themselves a cine-matic hybrid of film form and traditional folk culture adapted from thesongs sung by the tea picking girls in the Anhui province of China.Despite their appearance of essentialist cultural authenticity, EdwinChen, in his preliminary study of the genre, considers the huangmeidiao as a highly cinematic genre & comparable to the American clas-sical musical theatre established on Broadway in the early 1940s
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