Hong Kong Dark 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 first comprehensive collection on the subject of Hong Kong neo-noir cinema, this book examines the way Hong Kong has developed its own unique and culturally specific version of the neo-noir genre, while at the same time drawing on and adapting existing international noir cinemas. With a range of contributions from established and emerging scholars, this book illuminates the origins of Hong Kong neo-noir, its styles and contemporary manifestations, and its connection to mainland China. Case studies include classics such as The Wild Wild Rose (1960) and more recent films like Full Alert (1997) and Exiled (2007), as well as an in-depth look at the careers of iconic figures like Johnnie To and Jackie Chan. By examining at its past and its contemporary development, Hong Kong Neo-Noir also points towards the genre's possible future development.

Giving fresh and fascinating insights into the vibrant area of Hong Kong, this exciting book links Hong Kong with world film culture both within and beyond the commercial Hollywood paradigm.

This book explores 2010s Hong Kong film industry, focusing on its (presumably) independent sector. Although frequently mentioned in global film industry studies, the term ‘independent film’ does not always carry a clear meaning. Starting with this point, this book studies closely Hong Kong’s new indie cinema of the 2010s from political, economic, social, cultural, and film industrial perspectives, arguing that this indie cinema was vital to the long-term sustainability of the city’s film industry.

Critical theory and popular wisdom are rife with images of surveillance as an intrusive, repressive practice often suggestively attributed to eastern powers and opposed to western liberalism. Hollywood-dominated global media has long promulgated a geopoliticized east-west axis of freedom vs. control. This book focuses on Asian and Asia-based films and cinematic traditions obscured by lopsided western hegemonic discourse and—more specifically—probes these films’ treatments of a phenomenon that western film often portrays with neo-orientalist hysteria. Exploring recent and historical movies made in post-social and anti-Communist societies such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, the book picks up on the political and economic concerns implicitly underlying Sinophobic and anti-Communist Asian images in Hollywood films while also considering how these societies and states depict the issues of centralization, militarization and technological innovation so often figured as distinctive of the difference between eastern despotism and western liberalism.

The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.

This book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.

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