Hong Kong Screenscapes

Global connections and screen innovations converge in Hong Kong cinema. Energized by transnational images and human flows from China and Asia, Hong Kong's commercial filmmakers and independent pioneers have actively challenged established genres and narrative conventions to create a cultural space independent of Hollywood. The circulation of Hong Kong films through art house and film festival circuits, as well as independent DVDs and galleries and internet sites, reveals many differences within global cultural distributions, as well as distinctive tensions between experimental media artists and traditional screen architects. Coving the contributions of Hong Kong New Wave directors such as Wong Karwai, Stanley Kwan, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, and Tsui Hark, the volume links their spirit of innovation to work by independent, experimental, and documentary filmmakers, including Fruit Chan, Tammy Cheung, Evans Chan, Yau Ching and digital artist Isaac Leung. Within an interdisciplinary frame that highlights issues of political marginalization, censorship, sexual orientation, gender hierarchies, "flexible citizenship" and local/global identities, this book speaks to scholars and students within as well as beyond the field of Hong Kong cinema. Esther M.K. Cheung is chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) at the University of Hong Kong. Gina Marchetti teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Tan See-Kam presently works and researches at the University of Macau.

A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema provides the firstcomprehensive scholarly exploration of this unique global cinema.By embracing the interdisciplinary approach of contemporary filmand cultural studies, this collection navigates theoretical debateswhile charting a new course for future research in Hong Kongfilm. Examines Hong Kong cinema within an interdisciplinary context,drawing connections between media, gender, and Asian studies,Asian regional studies, Chinese language and cultural studies,global studies, and critical theory Highlights the often contentious debates that shape currentthinking about film as a medium and its possible future Investigates how changing research on gender, the body, andsexual orientation alter the ways in which we analyze sexualdifference in Hong Kong cinema Charts how developments in theories of colonialism,postcolonialism, globalization, neoliberalism, Orientalism,and nationalism transform our understanding of the economics andpolitics of the Hong Kong film industry Explores how the concepts of diaspora, nostalgia, exile, andtrauma offer opportunities to rethink accepted ways ofunderstanding Hong Kong’s popular cinematic genres andstars

This book examines how in navigating Hong Kong’s colonial history alongside its ever-present Chinese identity, the city has come to manifest a conflicting socio-cultural plurality. Drawing together scholars, critics, commentators, and creators on the vanguard of the emerging field of Hong Kong Studies, the essay volume presents a gyroscopic perspective that discerns what is made in from what is made into Hong Kong while weaving a patchwork of the territory’s contested local imaginary. This collection celebrates as it critiques the current state of Hong Kong society on the 20th anniversary of its handover to China. The gyroscopic outlook of the volume makes it a true area studies book-length treatment of Hong Kong, and a key and interdisciplinary read for students and scholars wishing to explore the territory’s complexities.

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.

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.

The rapid development of Hong Kong has occasioned the demolition of buildings and landscapes of historic significance, but film acts as a repository for memories of lost places, vanished vistas and material objects. Location shoots in Hong Kong have preserved many disappearing landmarks of the city, and the resulting films function as valuable and irreplaceable archives of the city’s evolution. Far more than a simple collection of movie locations, this book delivers a rare glimpse into the history of film production practices in Hong Kong. The locations described here are often not the most iconic; rather, they are the anonymous streets and back alleys used by local film studios in the 1960s and 70s. They are the garden cafes with outdoor seating near the Chinese University of Hong Kong where moments of conflict in romantic comedies erupt and dissipate. They are the old Kai Tak Airport, which channels rage and desire, and the tenement housing, which splits citizens into greedy landlords and the diligent working class and embodies old-day communal values. Modern Hong Kong horror films draw their power from the material character of home-grown convenient stores, shopping arcades and lost mansions found under modern high rises. As in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To, readers will drift and dash through the streets of Central to the district’s periphery, almost recklessly, automatically, or for the sheer pleasure of roaming. The first of its kind in English, this book is more than a city guide to Hong Kong through the medium of film; it is a unique exploration of relationship between location and place and genre innovations in Hong Kong cinema.

The Cold War was a distinct and crucial period in Hong Kong's evolution and in its relations with China and the rest of the world. Hong Kong was a window through which the West could monitor what was happening in China and an outlet that China could use to keep in touch with the outside world. Exploring the many complexities of Cold War politics from a global and interdisciplinary perspective, Hong Kong in the Cold War shows how Hong Kong attained and honed a pragmatic tradition that bridged the abyss between such opposite ideas as capitalism and communism, thus maintaining a compromise between China and the rest of the world. The chapters are written by nine leading international scholars and address issues of diplomacy and politics, finance and economics, intelligence and propaganda, refugees and humanitarianism, tourism and popular culture, and their lasting impact on Hong Kong. Far from simply describing a historical period, these essays show that Hong Kong's unique Cold War experience may provide a viable blueprint for modern-day China to develop a similar model of good governance and may in fact hold the key to the successful implementation of the One Country Two Systems idea. “This is a timely collection of essays on the role of Hong Kong in a global context and its multifaceted relationship with mainland China. It is emerging at a particularly appropriate moment when the local community has been provoked to reflect on its common fate under the notion of ‘one country, two systems.’” —Ray Yep, City University of Hong Kong “Hong Kong, the ‘Berlin of the East,’ was transformed by the Cold War, an existential conflict between capitalism and communism. Consequently, this fine volume is a must-read for political, cultural, and economic historians of Hong Kong. International historians should also add this collection of essays and cutting-edge empirical studies to their reading lists: it will enrich their understandings of the Global Cold War.” —David Clayton, University of York

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the commerce–art–politics nexus of Hong Kong cinema from 2000 to 2020, investigating the current nascent generation of film workers who joined the industry as it gradually entered an era marked by the domination of Hong Kong/mainland co-productions. Fangyu Chen explores the filmmaking ideologies of the emerging filmmakers from both within and beyond their film texts and uncovers the artistic and ideological discrepancies between this generation and their predecessors—the established generation who contributed to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema during its economic boom. By tracing the studies of national cinema and transnational cinema, Chen debunks the national/transnational antagonism with the case of post-2000 Hong Kong cinema and argues that it has split into two: a transnational cinema represented by the established generation of filmmakers and a national cinema that is driven by the nascent generation who are struggling for better preservation of Hong Kong local culture and their own cultural identities. Employing a Hong Kong/mainland film dynamics perspective, this study addresses a gap in the academic study of Hong Kong cinema, drawing attention to the material conditions and artistic visions of the craft labour in the industry. Scholars of communication, film studies, and labor economics will find this book of particular interest.