The Disunity of Body and Soul: Border-Crossing Anxieties in the First Post-War Hong Kong Song-and-Dance Film Portrait of Four Beauties

Why did Portrait of Four Beauties (1948), the first post-war Hong Kong Mandarin song-and-dance film, fail both at the box office and critically in both Shanghai and Hong Kong? In the knowledge production of film historiography, how do we situate films which are artistic and commercial failures and rediscover their significance? This essay does not intend to assert the artistic significance of Portrait of Four Beauties. Rather, it approaches the film through the lens of its border-crossing failure and discusses Hu Xinling as a misunderstood border-crossing director. I argue that Portrait of Four Beauties, as both an artistic and commercial failure, is best understood as director Hu Xinling’s subtle expression of southbound filmmakers’ border-crossing anxieties as they navigated between wartime Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong film industries through the dialectic of the real and the fake, the dilemma between artistic and romantic pursuits, and the disunity of body and soul in song-and-dance performances on the part of the female artists.