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At the core of Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation is a fascinating paradox: the martial arts film, long regarded as a vehicle of Chinese cultural nationalism, can also be understood as a mass cultural expression of Hong Kong’s modern urban-industrial society. This important and popular genre, Man-Fung Yip argues, articulates the experiential qualities, the competing social subjectivities and gender discourses, as well as the heightened circulation of capital, people, goods, information, and technologies in Hong Kong of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to providing a novel conceptual framework for the study of Hong Kong martial arts cinema a...
In 1978 the films Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, both starring a young Jackie Chan, caused a stir in the Hong Kong cinema industry and changed the landscape of martial arts cinema. Mixing virtuoso displays of acrobatic kung fu with knockabout humor to huge box office success, they broke the mold of the tragic and heroic martial arts film and sparked not only a wave of imitations, but also a much longer trend for kung fu comedies that continues to the present day. Legacies of the Drunken Master—the first book-length analysis of kung fu comedy—interrogates the politics of the films and their representations of the performing body. It draws on an interdisciplinary engagem...
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Celluloid Democracy tells the story of the Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways through the decades of authoritarian rule that followed Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation. Employing tactics that ranged from representing the dispossessed on the screen to redistributing state-controlled resources through bootlegging, these film workers explored ideas and practices that simultaneously challenged repressive rule and pushed the limits of the cinematic medium. Drawing on archival research, film analysis, and interviews, Hieyoon Kim examines how their work foregrounds a utopian vision of democracy where the ruled represent themselves and access resources free from state suppression. The first book to offer a history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, Celluloid Democracy shows how Korean film workers during the Cold War reclaimed cinema as an ecology in which democratic discourses and practices could flourish.
In Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, a variety of scholars explore the history, aesthetics, and politics of Chinese cinema as the Chinese film industry grapples with its place as the second largest film industry in the world. Exploring the various ways that Chinese cinema engages with global politics, market forces, and film cultures, this edited volume places Chinese cinema against an array of contexts informing the contours of Chinese cinema today. The book also demonstrates that Chinese cinema in the global context is informed by the intersections and tensions found in Chinese and world politics, national and international co-productions, the local and global in represen...
American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age examines the recent challenges to the conventions of realist documentary through the lens of war documentary films by Ken Burns, Michael Moore, and Errol Morris. During the twentieth century, the invention of new technologies of audiovisual representation such as cinema, television, video, and digital media have transformed the modes of historical narration and with it forced historians to assess the impact of new visual technologies on the construction of history. This book investigates the manner in which this contemporary Western "crisis" in historical narrative is produced by a larger epistemological shift in visual culture. Ricciardelli uses the theme of war as depicted in these directors’ films to focus her study and look at the model(s) of national identity that Burns, Morris, and Moore shape through their depictions of US military actions. She examines how postcolonial critiques of historicism and the advent of digitization have affected the narrative structure of documentary film and the shaping of historical consciousness through cinematic representation.
Spectacle is not often considered to be a significant part of the style of ‘classical’ cinema. Indeed, some of the most influential accounts of cinematic classicism define it virtually by the supposed absence of spectacle. Spectacle in ‘Classical’ Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s brings a fresh perspective on the role of the spectacular in classical sound cinema by focusing on one decade of cinema (the 1930s), in two ‘modes’ of filmmaking (musical and historical films), and in two national cinemas (the US and France). This not only brings to light the special rhetorical and affective possibilities offered by spectacular images but refines our understanding of what ‘classical’ cinema is and was.
Amanda Howell offers a new perspective on the contemporary pop score as the means by which masculinities not seen—or heard—before become a part of post-World War II American cinema. Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action addresses itself to an eclectic mix of film, from Elvis and Travolta star vehicles to Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster action, including the work of musically-innovative directors, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Scorsese, Gregg Araki, and Quentin Tarantino. Of particular interest is the way these films and their representations of masculinity are shaped by generic exchanges among contemporary music, music cultures, and film, combining American cinema's long-standing in...
Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia...
In Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949–1966, Qiliang He inquired into the making of the new citizenry in Mao-era China (1949–1976) by studying five preeminent Shanghai-based filmmakers. These case studies shed light on how individuals’ subjectivities took shape in the cinematic arena under a new sociopolitical system after 1949. He suggests that a filmmaker’s subjectivity was not fixed or stable but constantly in flux, requiring a host of “subjectivizing practices” to (re)shape and consolidate it. These filmmakers endeavored to reap maximal benefits from Mao’s sociopolitical system and minimize the disadvantages that would m...