Stanley Kwan's Center Stage

Center Stage is widely recognized as a classic of the New Hong Kong cinema. The film’s status has until now been attributed to the fascinating way in which Kwan combines a reconstruction of Ruan Lingyu’s tragic life as a Chinese film star with sequences documenting the making of his film. This reflexive dimension is typically held to show that Kwan endorses a broadly postmodernist conception of historical knowledge as essentially unattainable.