人民記憶、華人性和女性移民：以吳村的馬華電影為中心

Popular Memory, Chineseness and Female Immigrants: A Case Study on Wu Cun’s Mahua Cinema

本文探討中國導演吳村於二戰後在星加坡完成拍攝的三部華語電影。通過細讀電影文本和圍繞著1940年代星馬電影小報《娛樂》和《電影圈》對這些電影的記載和論述，重構「馬華電影」的人民記憶與「馬華文學」的關係，探討「馬華電影」的命名在其誕生的時代脈絡與中國電影文化的關係，並參照早期中國女性移民到南洋的歷史材料，探討這些電影如何再現二戰後馬華女性的移民、遺民和夷民。這三部電影均以女性為主角，男性為配角，影片透過瘋婦的瘋言譫語，提前預言冷戰時代的二元對立思維。本文批判性地挪用冷戰時代的星馬華人性和華人政治類型理論，分析和對照這些電影再現的華人性和華人政治類型。這三部電影均生產於二戰後「馬華文藝獨特性」論戰的馬共最強盛時期，吳村與他本土邵氏機構的製作班底，除了在主題上，嘗試回應「馬華文藝獨特性」所主張的此時此地的現實星馬地方色彩，亦通過電影再現被主流歷史話語打壓的馬共遊擊隊或其支持者的左翼實踐。本文認為這三部早期馬華電影的華人性及其意識形態的「非馬非華」，其複雜性在於它既不純粹是屬於馬華，亦非完全肆屬於中國華僑的電影形態。這一切導致這些電影均被眼下主流的中國電影史、港臺電影史和新馬電影史的書寫，徹底遺忘或選擇性遺忘。

This article examines three Sinophone films shot in Singapore by director Wu Cun from China after the Second World War. Through close reading of these filmic texts and reportings and discussions of them in the 1940s Singapore-Malayan cinema tabloids Amusement and Dianying Quan, this article aims to reconstruct the popular memory of “Mahua (Malaysian Chinese) Cinemas” and their relationship with “Mahua Literature” and Chinese film culture. It also probes the naming of “Mahua Cinema” in their temporal context and how they re-present post-war Malayan Chinese female migrants, loyalists, and foreigners, with reference to historical materials on the migration of Chinese females to Nanyang in early days. Women play the lead in all three films, while men assume supporting roles. Through the ramblings of a madwoman, it predicts the binary oppositional thought of the cold war period. This article also critically employs relevant Cold War Singaporean and Malaysian theories to analyse and compare the Chineseness and political groups in these films. All three films were produced after the war, when the Malayan Communist Party, who debated aggressively about the “uniqueness of Malayan Chinese literature and art”, was burgeoning. Besides attempting to portray the real Singapore-Malayan local colour in that time and place as advocated by the “uniqueness of Malaysian Chinese literature and art”, Wu Cun and his local production partners, the Shaw Brothers Company, also re-presented the left-wing practice of Malayan Communist Party guerillas and their supporters that had been suppressed by mainstream historical discourse. This article holds that the complexity of Chineseness and its ideology in these three early Mahua films lies in their being “neither Malaysian nor Chinese”, that is, being neither purely Malaysian Chinese nor completely Overseas Chinese. This suggests, therefore, that these films were completely or selectively forgotten when current mainstream Mainland Chinese film history, Hong Kong/Taiwan film history, and Singaporean and Malaysian film history were written.