Surveillance In Asian Cinema

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.

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."

This book offers an interdisciplinary, historically grounded study of Asian cinemas’ complex responses to the Cold War conflict. It situates the global ideological rivalry within regional and local political, social, and cultural processes, while offering a transnational and cross-regional focus. This volume makes a major contribution to constructing a cultural and popular cinema history of the global Cold War. Its geographical focus is set on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. In adopting such an inclusive approach, it draws attention to the different manifestations and meanings of the connections between the Cold War and cinema across Asian borders. Many essays in the volume have a transnational and cross-regional focus, one that sheds light on Cold War-influenced networks (such as the circulation of socialist films across communist countries) and on the efforts of American agencies (such as the United States Information Service and the Asia Foundation) to establish a transregional infrastructure of "free cinema" to contain the communist influences in Asia. With its interdisciplinary orientation and broad geographical focus, the book will appeal to scholars and students from a wide variety of fields, including film studies, history (especially the burgeoning field of cultural Cold War studies), Asian studies, and US-Asian cultural relations.

This book brings together nine original chapters to examine genre agency in East Asian cinema within the transnational context. It addresses several urgent and pertinent issues such as the distribution and exhibition practices of East Asian genre films, intra-regional creative flow of screen culture, and genre’s creative response to censorship. The volume expands the scholarly discussion of the rich heritage and fast-changing landscape of filmmaking in East Asian cinemas. Confronting the complex interaction between genres, filmic narrative and aesthetics, film history and politics, and cross-cultural translation, this book not only reevaluates genre’s role in film production, distribution, and consumption, but also tackles several under-explored areas in film studies and transnational cinema, such as the history of East Asian commercial cinema, the East Asian film industry, and cross-media and cross-market film dissemination.

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.

This revised and updated new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of cinema in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as to disaporic and transnational Chinese film-making, from the beginnings of cinema to the present day. Chapters by leading international scholars are grouped in thematic sections addressing key historical periods, film movements, genres, stars and auteurs, and the industrial and technological contexts of cinema in Greater China.

This is a collection of essays marking the 30th anniversary of the historic Cold War’s formal conclusion in 1991. It enriches Cold War studies—a field dominated by Political Science, International Relations, and History—with insights from Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Film and Media Studies. Through critical analysis of newspaper and magazine articles, films, novels, art exhibits, museums, and other commemorative sites that engage with the themes of conflict, violence, trauma, displacement, marginalization, ecology, and identity, the book provides rich and diverse perspectives on the complex relationship between the historic Cold War and its legacies on the one hand and, on the other, their impact on Asia, its plural histories and peoples, and their shifting identities, ideological beliefs, and lived experiences. Today, we often speak of an ‘Asian century’ and witness intensifying concerns over ‘new cold wars’ or ‘Cold War 2.0’. A United States in decline and a China on the rise create conditions for a new superpower rivalry, with a trade war already being fought between the two competitors. Russia continues to flex its geopolitical muscles, launching a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in 2022, as its strongman leadership yearns nostalgically for the good old days of the USSR. As grand narratives and strategies of the Cold War jostle to make sense of high-level geopolitical events, this book descends to the level of lived experience, zooming in on ordinary and marginalized peoples, whose lives and livelihoods have been affected over the decades by the Cold War and its legacies.

Since its inception more than a century ago, Hong Kong cinema has been a pre-eminent form of local entertainment and a site of ideological contentions propelled by colonial, national and international politics at different historical junctures. The Other Side of Glamour is a study of the historical development of the left-wing film establishment in Hong Kong. The interplay between the macro-politics of the Cold War and the micro-politics of a regionalised/localised ideological warfare lends itself to a critical mapping of the general contours of the 'cultural Cold War' between the KMT and the CCP as it materialised in the so-called 'left-right divide' in the filmmaking world. Using the major studios as the main axis of analysis, this study traces the footprints of the other collaborating cultural agents which made up the left-wing film network in Hong Kong. It argues that the left-wing's institutional character and corporate strategies in the making of a 'popular left-wing cinema' are indispensable to an understanding of their nuanced legacy in Hong Kong cinema today.