The Cinema Of Hong Kong

This volume examines Hong Kong cinema in transnational, historical, and artistic contexts.

This is the first full-length English-language study of one of the world's most exciting and innovative cinemas. Covering a period from 1909 to 'the end of Hong Kong cinema' in the present day, this book features information about the films, the studios, the personalities and the contexts that have shaped a cinema famous for its energy and style. It includes studies of the films of King Hu, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, as well as those of John Woo and the directors of the various 'New Waves'. Stephen Teo explores this cinema from both Western and Chinese perspectives and encompasses genres ranging from melodrama to martial arts, 'kung fu', fantasy and horror movies, as well as the international art-house successes.

This definitive study of Hong Kong cinema examines the work of directors such as Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To, King Hu, and Wong Kar Wai.

The trajectory of Hong Kong films had been drastically affected long before the city’s official sovereignty transfer from the British to the Chinese in 1997. The change in course has become more visible in recent years as China has aggressively developed its national film industry and assumed the role of powerhouse in East Asia’s cinematic landscape. The author introduces the “Cinema of Transitions” to study the New Hong Kong Cinema and on- and off-screen life against this background. Using examples from the 1980s to the present, this book offers a fresh perspective on how Hong Kong-related Chinese-language films, filmmakers, audiences, and the workings of film business in East Asia have become major platforms on which “transitions” are negotiated.

Starting with the first "Western shadow plays" shown in the late 1890s, motion pictures have played a significant role in China's cultural existence for more than a century. Initially centered in Shanghai, Chinese cinema boomed in Hong Kong in the 1930s, aided by the advent of talkies and the influx of talent and investment from mainland China, Southeast Asia, and America. From the late 1940s, the territory supplanted Shanghai as the "Hollywood of China." In Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View, authors Law Kar and Frank Bren follow the story from Hong Kong's early silent, Chuang Tsi Tests His Wife, through the martial arts craze of the 1970s, to the medium's continued appeal to contemporary international audiences. Rather than provide a sweeping history, the authors focus on the impact of individual personalities, particularly local filmmakers and movie stars. They also consider Eastern and Western influences and examine major developments, including the changing role of women. By profiling key figures and events of the 20th century, this overview is the perfect introduction for anyone interested in Hong Kong's contribution to world cinema. Illustrated with photos.

From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multilocal process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through transregional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema. Among the book’s highlights are a rereading of The Goddess—one of the best-known silent Chinese films in the West—from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood’s fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood’s remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of “Chinese elements” in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach, a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalization. As such, Remaking Chinese Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.

Examining Hong Kong cinema from its inception in 1913 to the end of the colonial era, this work explains the key areas of production, market, film products and critical traditions. Hong Kong Cinema considers the different political formations of Hong Kong's culture as seen through the cinema, and deals with the historical, political, economic and cultural relations between Hong Kong cinema and other Chinese film industries on the mainland, as well as in Taiwan and South-East Asia. Discussion covers the concept of 'national cinema' in the context of Hong Kong's status as a quasi-nation with strong links to both the 'motherland' (China) and the 'coloniser' (Britain), and also argues that Hong Kong cinema is a national cinema only in an incomplete and ambiguous sense.

Breathtaking swordplay and nostalgic love, Peking opera and Chow Yun-fat's cult followers -- these are some of the elements of the vivid and diverse urban imagination that find form and expression in the thriving Hong Kong cinema. All receive their due in At Full Speed, a volume that captures the remarkable range and energy of a cinema that borrows, invents, and reinvents across the boundaries of time, culture, and conventions. At Full Speed gathers film scholars and critics from around the globe to convey the transnational, multilayered character that Hong Kong films acquire and impart as they circulate worldwide. These writers scrutinize the films they find captivating: from the lesser known works of Law Man and Yuen Woo Ping to such film festival notables as Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai, and from the commercial action, romance, and comedy genres of Jackie Chan, Peter Chan, Steven Chiau, Tsui Hark, John Woo, and Derek Yee to the attempted departures of Evans Chan, Ann Hui, and Clara Law. In this cinema the contributors identify an aesthetics of action, gender-flexible melodramatic excesses, objects of nostalgia, and globally projected local history and identities, as well as an active critical film community. Their work, the most incisive account ever given of one of the world's largest film industries, brings the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong cinema into clear close-up focus even as it enlarges on the relationships between art and the market, cultural theory and the movies.

When Ridley Scott envisioned Blade Runner's set as "Hong Kong on a bad day," he nodded to the city's overcrowding as well as its widespread use of surveillance. But while Scott brought Hong Kong and surveillance into the global film repertoire, the city's own cinema has remained outside of the global surveillance discussion. In Arresting Cinema, Karen Fang delivers a unifying account of Hong Kong cinema that draws upon its renowned crime films and other unique genres to demonstrate Hong Kong's view of surveillance. She argues that Hong Kong's films display a tolerance of—and even opportunism towards—the soft cage of constant observation, unlike the fearful view prevalent in the West. However, many surveillance cinema studies focus solely on European and Hollywood films, discounting other artistic traditions and industrial circumstances. Hong Kong's films show a more crowded, increasingly economically stratified, and postnational world that nevertheless offers an aura of hopeful futurity. Only by exploring Hong Kong surveillance film can we begin to shape a truly global understanding of Hitchcock's "rear window ethics."

From the dazzling choreography of martial arts movies to the gore of the "heroic bloodshed" genre, Hong Kong action films are masterpieces of style and fury, and a prime source of inspiration for Hollywood. Tracing the background of this enticing film genre from the influences of Chinese opera to the mixture of fantasy and fast-paced action of the present day style, this is essential reading for both the intrigued layman and the die-hard Hong Kong fan. Photos, 95 in color.