Extraterritorial cinema: Shanghai jazz and post-war Hong Kong Mandarin musicals

During the 1930s, jazz in Shanghai (shidai qu 時代曲/music of the time), in a culturally, politically and musically hybrid form, negotiated the contesting sociopolitical values and cultural imaginations in the semicolonial city. In this article, Victor Fan contextualizes the re-emergence of the Shanghai jazz in the Hong Kong Mandarin musicals between 1945 and 1949, and uses the film Chang xiangsi (《長相思》)/An All-Consuming Love (He Zhaozhang 何兆璋, 1947) to examine how this genre re-appropriates this musical style to renegotiate the film-makers and spectators’ conflicting political affiliations and traumatic memories, what Fan calls ‘extraterritorial consciousness’.