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Writer Eileen Chang began to have ideas for her novella, Love in a Fallen City in 1943. The novella which is about a romance between Fan Liu-Yuan and Pai Liu-So in the decadent Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion is the best known one of Eileen Chang’s works. Hong Kong director Ann Hui brought it to the big screen of the same name in 1984. Additionally, China director Ji Meng and scenarist Jingzhi Zou also adapted this novella to the TV dramas of the same name in 2009. The concept of intertextuality is when related works of literature are interconnected and influence an audience’s interpretation of the text. Intertextuality can apply to any text, and it is the absorption and interpretation of other texts. When a novel is edited into a films, there is a very strong sense of intertextuality, as when the words in the novel are combined with images in the film, not only are you enabling more varied styles to be developed in the film, you are also providing new angles from which the audience can read the film. Love in a Fallen City was constructed using Eileen Chang’s keen and penetrating writing style, she saw clearly the love and bleakness in humanity. Ann Hui’s realistic movie is known for her unique humanistic care. Ji Meng and Jingzhi Zou are famous China director and scenarist. There exists both differences and intertextuality in the original work, movie and TV dramas with regards to the way the general plot is described and the way the scenes are depicted. This thesis hopes to use methods of primary analysis and comparisons to allow the reader to further understand the intertextuality between the original novella, the movie version, and the TV dramas version of Love in a Fallen City.
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