Vehicles of Modernity: Gender, Mobility and Music in Evan Yang’s MP&GI films

This article highlights Shanghai émigré film director Evan Yang as a central figure for our understanding of MP&GI’s films produced in Cold War Hong Kong. It contends that Yang’s films exemplify how expressions of modernity in MP&GI’s films are not solely influenced by Hollywood but are also negotiations of cultures made by diasporic filmmakers during the Cold War. Building on the premise that the relationship between the modern woman and her vehicle was one of the critical ways in which modernity was construed by Shanghai modernist writers during the 1930s, this article examines three of Yang’s films, Air Hostess (1959),Our Dream Car (1959) and It’s Always Spring (1962); it argues that Yang’s spectacles of modernity, which often feature modern women and vehicles, can be considered as rewriting Shanghai modernist literary tropes into Cold War Hong Kong cinema. Specifically, by approaching the concept of “vehicle” from three perspectives – vehicles as material emblems of capitalist modernity, women as vehicles of modernity, and music as a pedagogical vehicle of modernity, this chapter asks: what does it mean for a woman to be a travelling spectator of capitalist modernity and for an urbanizing Asia to be represented through her gaze and voice? I propose that Yang’s representations of gendered mobility and modernity are not only linked to Cold War ideals of transnational movement, speed and capitalism; it should also be contextualized as a transcultural aesthetic that gained an afterlife through the border-crossing routes of Shanghai émigrés in Cold War Hong Kong.