Cultural Interpretation Of Stephen Chow Movies

We can not ignore Stephen Chou when we mention the comedies of the 1990s. Because of the unique style of Chou's movies, people name them WuLitou movies. The WuLitou movies cause laughters frenziedly and seem to have no meanings at all. However, there is also no lack of mocking and subverting some traditional and orthodox ideas in Chou's movies. That's why many investigators include them in the category of post-modernist culture. But the movies which have some post-modernist characteristics are not presumed to be the post-modernist texts. The theory of post-modernism still remains to be uncompleted and controversial.In fact, Stephen Chou's movies are strongly influenced by the traditional culture.The post-modernist characteristics of Stephen Chou's movies have been analysed comparatively clearly and profoundly. But less attention was paid to the factors of traditional culture in his movies. The emphasis of this thesis is to review the traditional culture factors in Stephen Chou's movies, especially the inheritance and use of traditional comedy skills and the partiality for traditional subjects and values. The thesis emphasizes the use of the developed traditional comedy skills which had been proficiently used in the classical comedies, and the special skills of Carvinal culture, mainly the Carvinal language and the weird body image emerged as the important iamge in Carvinal culture. Although the person who raised the Carvinal theory was not Chinese, there is no lack of carvinal spirit which all human beings have in the Chinese traditional culture. The review may be not profound and meticulous enough. But if it could make us find the possibility or even the necessity of investigating Stephen Chou's movies and the theory of post-modernism again, then we can say that the aims of this thesis had already been achieved.