[轉錄] 澳洲影展- Listening for a footfall
這篇是澳洲方面紀念影展的文章
October 29, 2003
Leslie Cheung connected with film and music audiences in multiple ways
- among them androgyny, glamour and vulnerability, writes Philippa Hawker.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/28/1067233170327.html
It's 10.30pm on a humid Hong Kong night and I'm wandering around the
Sino Centre on Nathan Road, looking for Leslie Cheung. In this multi-storey,
Asian pop-culture collector's paradise, a night market stacked with Hong
Kong movie star pin-ups and snapshots, Japanese anime boxed sets, bootleg
DVDs, Cantopop CDs, new-release video games, brand-name runners and Real
Madrid shirts with David Beckham's number on them, I'm starting to suffer
from a consumer's version of rapture of the deep: light-headed from too
many sounds, too many images, far too much stuff.
And then I turn another corner, and I've found him. Hundreds upon
hundreds of photographs. Boxes, files and plastic wallets full of them.
Booklets and concert programs. Leslie keychains and pens. A series of small
black-and white prints, in which he looks like a dreamy schoolboy. Movie
stills. Paparazzi shots. Leslie in glasses. Unshaven. In leather. With
brilliantined, Elvis hair. In a jacket with ski-slope shoulders. Holding
a tennis racket. In concert, in some of his wilder outfits, his Gaultier
white tuxedo with angel wings; his shimmering gold suit and waist-length
wig. The young woman behind the counter keeps pointing to more and more
images, as if she is summoning them up with a magic wand.
Leslie Cheung was one of cinema's most luminous and compelling stars:
a beautiful, gifted actor and singer. On April 1 this year, he took his own
life, and Hong Kong was plunged into mourning.
I came late to Leslie - in the mid-1990s, decades after his film debut.
He appeared in almost 60 movies: I've managed to see about half of them.
There was something about him I immediately connected with: his androgyny,
glamour, wickedness, vulnerability and playfulness. His beauty seems self-
sufficient and effortless, yet it's never complete; there's always an edge
of yearning for something beyond itself.
The more you watch his performances, the more you become aware of the
tiny details that underpin them - the way he never took his beauty or his
grace for granted. Leslie seemed ageless, too: from the early '80s to the
late '90s, he barely looks a day older.
And he made some great films. His career flourished during a golden
age of Hong Kong movie-making. He starred in John Woo bullet ballets, wild
ghost stories, yearning period films, arthouse masterpieces, popular
comedies. He made three movies with Hong Kong's master of hybridity and
delirium, Wong Kar-wai. In Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine - winner of
the Palme d'Or at Cannes - he embraced the role of a Beijing opera singer
who specialised in female roles, a performance that is a remarkable
combination of restraint, self-consciousness and excess, where the lines
between his character and his character's life as a performer are well and
truly blurred.
With his movie-star aura, he has been compared with the likes of Dirk
Bogarde, James Dean and Montgomery Clift, actors who presented different
versions of masculinity and vulnerability. Some things about him were
specifically Hong Kong, however. The music, for example. He had been a
huge pop idol in the '80s, and his singing career was still flourishing.
I'd listened to a few songs, watched some of his concert footage, seen the
playful, flirtatious exploration of costume, performance, gender that
marked his most recent concert tours. I was aware that he had come out
recently, in a showbiz milieu with a fairly hostile attitude towards
homosexuality, and that his popularity continued unabated.
I'd been planning for some time to write a piece about Leslie,
something that tried to account for his particular, contradictory,
seductive qualities: damaged glamour, vulnerability and extravagance on
the one hand, careful attention to the telling details of performance on
the other. Now there was another imperative. When Clare Stewart, cinema
programmer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, asked me to
assist her in curating a Leslie Cheung retrospective, and to work on a
publication to go with it, I didn't hesitate. So here I am, at the Sino
Centre, making a pilgrimage to a Leslie site, a place where fans have
traditionally gone to stock up on images of their phantom lover, their
older brother, their idol. Am I here to look, or to buy? What am I
actually after?
Leslie's death had hit Hong Kong hard. It was in the middle of the
SARS crisis, there was controversy over proposed new government
legislation that seemed to threaten individual liberties. At the time,
as I read online news reports, discussion-group postings, swiftly written
tributes, the shock and distress was palpable.
Obituaries followed. Time critic Richard Corliss called Leslie the
most widely adored and admired male diva of the late-20th century. Actress
Maggie Cheung wrote a lovely recollection in Cahiers du Cinema, which ends
with a haunting image of Leslie painstakingly working on a single element
of performance - the sound of his footsteps.
Clare and I contacted a range of writers and filmmakers, asking them
to contribute a brief appreciation or memory of Leslie for publication.
Everyone has something different and perceptive to say. Sometimes the
emotional intensity of these responses is raw and startling. Producer and
director Tsui Hark wrote a heartfelt evocation of encounters in the final
month of Leslie's life, as Tsui worked on a script for a film he hoped
they would make together. Chen Kaige had already prepared a loving tribute.
In Hong Kong, everyone I speak to, whatever their connection with film,
seems to have a Leslie story. I meet one of his closest friends, producer
Nansun Shi: she has warm and witty stories about everything from his
dedicated approach to his work to his competitive attitude to badminton.
I meet some of his devoted fans. These voices complement each other. I'm
piecing together a picture of Leslie, a composite of memories, emotional
connections, anecdotes, avowals and beliefs.
Clare and I meet Josephine, Joey, Donna and Carol, Leslie devotees
since the '80s. Josephine set up a website, http://www.lesliecheung.cc :
theyorganised a tribute event on September 12, which would have been his
47th birthday. They show us a tribute program, an immaculately presented
booklet, with images, quotes and a detailed running order for the event,
held in a venue called the Fringe Club, chosen because it was the location
of one of his popular comedies, He's a Woman, She's a Man.
They're fascinated by our interest in Leslie, surprised that Clare and
I have become fans through his films, rather than his music. At one point,
Joey starts to sing a favourite song, Once Upon an Ordinary Girl, quietly
and intently, and the others gradually join in.
My own observations and recollections are starting to shade into other
people's. So much of my Leslie experience has been belated, second-hand: I
didn't go to one of his concerts (he toured Australia); I didn't interview
him; I never caught a glimpse of him in the street or at a premiere.
There's a Frank O'Hara poem, an urbane elegy called The Day That Lady
Died, which ends with the poet seeing a newspaper headline announcing the
death of Billie Holiday, and remembering how he saw her once at a club,
"while she whispered a song along the keyboard" to her pianist "and everyone
and I stopped breathing". I don't have that direct experience, that intimate
memory of live performance or presence.
But there is something about fandom, I realise, that is a complex
mixture of possessiveness and generosity: you have your own particular
circumscribed relationship with the object of your devotion, but you want
to share the experiences you have and make a connection with the experiences
and recollections of others.
Loss demands more than ever of this heightened awareness - an
affirmation that maintains the presence of the person and the work, that
insists on their continuing importance.
At the Sino Centre, I'm overwhelmed by choice. I can't cope with the
sheer volume of images. I buy one large glossy print and one small black-
and-white photograph, and walk slowly outside into the street to catch my
breath.
Days of Being Wild: The Screen Life of Leslie Cheung, 10 features and
a documentary, screens at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image from
tomorrow to November 9. See www.acmi.net.au for program details.
--
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