23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival

This volume examines the transmission, reception, and reproduction of new cinematic styles, meanings, practices, and norms in early twenty-first-century Asia. Hong Kong and Bollywood offers new answers to the field of inter-Asian cultural studies, which has been energized by the trends towards transnationalism and translatability. It brings together a team of international scholars to capture the latest development in the film industries of Hong Kong and Mumbai, and to explore similar cross-cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues. It also explains how Hong Kong and Bollywood filmmakers have gone beyond the traditional focus on nationalism, urbanity and biculturalism to reposition themselves as new cultural forces in the pantheon of global cinema.

This book is a scholarly investigation of the historical development and contemporary transformation of film noir in today’s Hong Kong. Focusing on the evolvement of cinematic narratives, aesthetics, and techniques, the author balances a deep reading of the multiple filmic plots with a discussion of the cinematic portrayals of gender, romance, identities and power relations. Nuancing the prototypical cinematic form and tragic sense of classical film noir, the recent Hong Kong cinema turns around the classical generic role of film noir at the turn of the century to convey very different messages—joy, hope or love. This book examines how the mainstream cinema, or pre-and-post-Hong Kong cinema in particular, applies a peculiar strategy that makes rooms for the audience to enjoy a pleasure-giving process of reflexivity and also critique the mainstream ideology. With new analytical approaches and angles, this book breaks new ground in offering transcultural and cross-genre analyses on the cinema and its impact in local and international markets. This book is the first major scholarly investigation of the historical development and contemporary transformation of film noir in today’s Hong Kong. Focusing on the evolvement of cinematic narratives, aesthetics, and techniques, the author balances a deep reading of the multiple filmic plots with a refreshing discussion of the cinematic portrayals of gender, romance, identities and power relations. This book also revisits conceptual categories developed by Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Butler.

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.

Director in Action examines the career of Johnnie To, whose art-house action hits include A Hero Never Dies, The Longest Nite, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, Election, and Election 2. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between director and genre, why To is regarded as an auteur, and the influence he has on the trajectory of the action genre in the Hong Kong cinema. The author's view is that To's idiosyncratic auteurist style transforms the generic conventions under which he is compelled to work, and that there is a discernible element of experimentalism in his most outstanding films. In addition, To modulates the film noir form to suit his local contexts, characters and locations, to create a highly personalized noir cinema in post-1997 Hong Kong.

As one of the most popular and versatile Hong Kong film stars, Chow Yun-fat has enjoyed international success over the last four decades. Using Chow's transnational and trans-regional star persona as a case study, Lin Feng investigates stardom as an agent for mediating the sociocultural construction of Hong Kong and Chinese identities. Through the analysis of Chow's on- and off-screen star image, the book recognises that a star's image is unstable and fragmented across distinct historical junctures, geographic borders and media platforms. Following Chow's career move from Hong Kong to Hollywood, and then to transnational Chinese cinema, Chow Yun-fat and Territories of Hong Kong Stardom highlights the complex redefinitions of local and global, traditional and modern, and East and West, that Chow's image has undergone, exploring the nature of Chinese and transnational stardom, the East Asian film industry, and Asian male stardom beyond martial arts and action cinema.

From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997 explores the important interconnections involving questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on world screens by examining a range of films, videos, and digital works associated with global Chinese culture. The ways in which the world has imagined China and the images the Chinese have used to depict themselves have changed dramatically since 1989. The media spotlight placed on Beijing during the spring of 1989 created repercussions that continue to affect how China is seen globally, how it sees itself, and how the Chinese outside the People's Republic see themselves. The films and other texts included in this book represent a range of work by media artists working within China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and on transnational co-productions involving those places. The book also features media from other positions within the Chinese diaspora (including Chinese America) and work produced on China by non-Chinese. Highlighting questions of the circulation of images, people, and commodities, the book explores the important interconnections involving questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on global screens. Beginning and ending with Tian'anmen and world image culture, a portrait emerges of momentous change and persistent challenges facing media artists and filmmakers working within "Greater China."

Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception. Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.