The left-wing legacy in ’70s Hong Kong television: Chameleon (1978) and Lee Sil-hong’s Rediffusion (RTV) tetralogy

Abstract

A missing chapter in the history of postwar left-wing Hong Kong cinema involves the channeling of its energies into television in the 1970s. At Rediffusion (RTV), producer Lee Sil-hong – son of director Lee Sun-fung – mobilized veterans from the classical period of the left-wing studios to produce a tetralogy of serialized television dramas that represent the apotheosis of the jiating lunli pian, not only resurrecting the spirit behind such classic Union melodramas as In the Face of Demolition (1953) or their celebrated adaptation of Ba Jin’s “Torrents” trilogy, but doing so with an epic ambition with regard to historical scope and scale that had been inconceivable even in the heyday of left-wing Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s. Providing a panoramic account of twentieth-­century Chinese history, Lee’s tetralogy – Chameleon (1978), Gone with the Wind (1980), Fatherland (1980), and Hong Kong Gentlemen (1981) – predates by at least a decade attempts by China’s Fifth Generation, New Taiwan Cinema, and the Hong Kong New Wave to address such subject matter in comparable fashion through the social epic or family melodrama. Factors that made possible Lee’s achievement include: (i) the central importance of television as a medium for the expression of local cultural identity during the period of Hong Kong’s economic takeoff, (ii) the renewal on television of left-wing filmmaking philosophy and practices inherited from Thirties Shanghai and Fifties Hong Kong, and (iii) the social realist sensibility of the left-wing tradition – along with its strong interest in the transcultural adaptation of foreign literature – that allowed it to frame local experience in terms of the global, benefitting from an awareness of both the 19th-century European novel and the contemporary American television epic. Situating Lee’s tetralogy within the broader historical context of persistent Chinese left-wing efforts across generations to contest politically rival screen practices, this essay analyzes Chameleon for its distinctive worldview and methods characteristic of the jiating lunli pian, while assessing its functional aesthetic as rooted in the literature-inspired realist melodrama with didactic aims – an inherited tradition to which it contributed a magisterial endpoint but beyond which it was unwilling to advance, unlike the groundbreaking modernism of the Hong Kong New Wave’s television work.