Download or read book Johnnie To Kei Fung s PTU written by Michael Ingham and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PTU is an underappreciated noir masterpiece by one of Hong Kong's most prolific and commercially successful directors. Johnnie To Kei-fung has been called "the poet of post-1997 and the economic savior of the Hong Kong film industry" for an extraordinary range of films produced during some of Hong Kong cinema's most difficult years. While many of To's celebrated films such as Election, Exiled and The Mission feature themes of criminal glory and revenge, PTU centers on the ethical dilemmas, personal dramas and stoic teamwork in the elite Police Tactical Unit. The story follows the PTU's all-night search for an officer's missing gun as they navigate triad turf struggles and marauding jewel thieves from mainland China. Shot over several years in the hauntingly empty pre-dawn streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, and released coincidentally amid the 2003 SARS panic, the film evokes Hong Kong's post-handover economic despair and multiple identity crises. In terms of character development and psychological complexity, Mike Ingham argues that PTU is the most aesthetically rigorous and satisfying of To's many films.
Download or read book Director in Action written by Stephen Teo and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Hong Kong Neo Noir written by Esther Yau and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Companion to Wong Kar wai written by Martha P. Nochimson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With 25 essays that embrace a wide spectrum of topics and perspectives including intertextuality, transnationality, gender representation, repetition, the use of music, color, and sound, depiction of time and space in human affairs, and Wong’s highly original portrayal of violence, A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai is a singular examination of the prestigious filmmaker known around the world for the innovation, beauty, and passion he brings to filmmaking. Brings together the most cutting edge, in-depth, and interesting scholarship on arguably the greatest living Asian filmmaker, from a multinational group of established and rising film scholars and critics Covers a huge breadth of topics such as the tradition of the jianghu in Wong's films; queering Wong's films not in terms of gender but through the artist's liminality; the phenomenological Wong; Wong's intertextuality; America through Wong's eyes; the optics of intensities, thresholds, and transfers of energy in Wong's cinema; and the diasporic presence of some ladies from Shanghai in Wong's Hong Kong Examines the political, historical, and sociological influence of Wong and his work, and discusses his work from a variety of perspectives including modern, post-modern, postcolonial, and queer theory Includes two appendices which examine Wong’s work in Hong Kong television and commercials
Download or read book Surveillance and Film written by J. Macgregor Wise and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Surveillance Studies Network Book Award: 2017 Surveillance is a common feature of everyday life. But how are we to make sense of or understand what surveillance is, how we should feel about it, and what, if anything, can we do? Surveillance and Film is an engaging and accessible book that maps out important themes in how popular culture imagines surveillance by examining key feature films that prominently address the subject. Drawing on dozens of examples from around the world, J. Macgregor Wise analyzes films that focus on those who watch (like Rear Window, Peeping Tom, Disturbia, Gigante, and The Lives of Others), films that focus on those who are watched (like The Conversation, Caché, and Ed TV), films that feature surveillance societies (like 1984, THX 1138, V for Vendetta, The Handmaid's Tale, The Truman Show, and Minority Report), surveillance procedural films (from The Naked City, to Hong Kong's Eye in the Sky, The Infernal Affairs Trilogy, and the Overheard Trilogy of films), and films that interrogate the aesthetics of the surveillance image itself (like Sliver, Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries), Der Riese, and Look). Wise uses these films to describe key models of understanding surveillance (like Big Brother, Panopticism, or the Control Society) as well as to raise issues of voyeurism, trust, ethics, technology, visibility, identity, privacy, and control that are essential elements of today's culture of surveillance. The text features questions for further discussion as well as lists of additional films that engage these topics.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics written by John Richardson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides powerful ways to understand changes in the current media landscape. Media forms and genres are proliferating as never before, from movies, computer games and iPods to video games and wireless phones. This essay collection by recognized scholars, practitioners and non-academic writers opens discussion in exciting new directions.
Download or read book Milkyway Image written by Yi Sun and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book adopts an integrative research framework that primarily combines industrial and discourse analysis to investigate the company Milkyway Image, drawing upon literature that studies film studios and the practices of film production, distribution, and reception. The history of the Hong Kong-based film production company Milkyway Image from its founding in 1996 to the present exemplifies the metamorphosis of the post-return Hong Kong film industry to an era characterised by Hong Kong’s integration into a Chinese national context and the transnationalisation of world cinema. It shows that contemporary Hong Kong cinema’s transition resists a monolithic chronicle and instead represents a narrative combining the perspectives of different interest groups and a complex process of compliance and resistance, negotiation and contestation. The meaning of Milkyway’s films shifts as they are circulated across cultures and viewed within diverse frameworks, and our understanding of Hong Kong cinema is subject to varying contexts and historical configurations. For researchers in film and media studies and those who have a general interest in Hong Kong cinema, Asian cinema, or contemporary film culture, this book reveals how a variety of industry and cultural bodies have become co-creators of meaning for a film production house, and how the company operates as a co-creator of the discourse that surrounds it.
Download or read book The Chinese Cinema Book written by Song Hwee Lim and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book John Woo s Bullet in the Head written by Tony Williams and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The film Bullet in the Head functions both as an apocalyptic melodrama and as an allegory of fears concerning the implications of the Tiananmen Square incident for Hong Kong residents. This book argues for its central importance as a major work of contemporary Hong Kong cinema.
Download or read book Tsui Hark s Peking Opera Blues written by Tan See Kam and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part historical drama, part thriller, and part comedy, Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues (1986) invites--if not demands--examinations from multiple perspectives. Tan See Kam rises to the challenge in this study by first situating Tsui in a Sinophone context. The diasporic director explores different dimensions of "Chineseness" in the film by depicting competing versions of Chinese nationalism and presenting characters speaking two Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin. In the process he compels viewers to recognize the multiplicities of the Chinese identity and rethink what constitutes cultural Chineseness. The challenge to a single definition of "Chinese" is also embodied by the playful pastiches of diverse materials. In a series of intertextual readings, Tan reveals the full complexity of Peking Opera Blues by placing it at the center of a web of texts consisting of Tsui's earlier film Shanghai Blues (1984), Hong Kong's Mandarin Canto-pop songs, the "three-women" films in Chinese-language cinemas, and of course, traditional Peking opera, whose role-types, makeup, and dress code enrich the meaning of the film. In Tan's portrayal, Tsui Hark is a filmmaker who makes masterly use of postmodernist techniques to address postcolonial concerns. More than a quarter of a century after its release, Tan shows, Peking Opera Blues still reverberates in the present time.
Download or read book Yonfan s Bugis Street written by Kenneth Chan and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bugis Street was famous (or notorious) for being a haunt of transgender prostitution in the early decades of postcolonial Singapore. Since then the site has been a source of touristic obsession and local cultural anxiety. In his 1995 film Bugis Street, director Yonfan brings the short lane back to vivid cinematic life. By focusing on the film's representations of queer sexualities and transgender experience, this book contends that the under-appreciated Bugis Street is a significant instance of queer transnational cinema. The film's playful yet nuanced articulations of queer embodiment, spatiality, and temporality provide an unexpected intervention in the public discourses on LGBT politics, activism, and cultures in Singapore today. This book's arrival at a much more complicated and contradictory picture of the discursive Bugis Street, through the examination of Yonfan's film and a range of other cultural and literary texts, adds a new critical dimension to the ongoing historical, geographical, sociological, ethnographic, and artistic analyses of this controversial space.
Download or read book Ann Hui s Song of the Exile written by Audrey Yue and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With due emphases on diasporic intimacies, cine-feminism, and transcultural literacy, Audrey Yue has written a sensitive and lucid study, doing justice to a remarkable film by a remarkable director."---Rey Chow, Duke University "This book pushes the boundaries of existing studies on Hong Kong cinema studies. Yue provides us with innovative ways of reading intimacy in the diaspora: as nostalgia for the familiar or idealised; as cultural memories that make up diasporic archives; as modes of transformation of kinship Structures; as affects produced through new media technologies. The book concludes with a self-reflexive exploration of teaching Song in Australia. By situating the film under the rubric of critical multiculturalism, Yue demonstrates how the teaching of postcolonial cinema can be sustained as a political pedagogy that resists the pluralist demands of a neoliberal curriculum. This is a carefully researched, rigorously analytical and intellectually profound study that will make its mark in the fields of diaspora, transcultural communication and cinema studies."---Jacqueline Lo, Australian National University The resolutely independent filmmaker Ann On-wah Hui continues to inspire critical acclaim for her sensitive portrayals of numerous Hong Kong tragedies and marginalized populations. In a pioneering career spanning three decades, Hui has been director, producer, writer and actress for more than 30 films. In this work, Audrey Yue analyses a 1990 film considered by many to be one of Hui's most haunting and poignant works, Song of the Exile. The semi-autobiographical film depicts a daughter's coming to terms with her mother's Japanese identity. Themes of cross-cultural alienation, divided loyalties and generational reconciliation resonate strongly amid the migration and displacement pressures surrounding Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Even now, more than a decade after the 1997 Handover, the film is a perennial favourite among returning Hong Kong emigrants and international cinema students. This book examines how Hui challenges the myth of the original home as singular, familial and romantic, and constructs the second home as a new space for Hong Kong modernity. Yue also discusses the teaching of the film in the diaspora, demonstrating its potential as an affective and performative text of transcultural literacy and diasporic negotiations in the cross-cultural classroom.
Download or read book Fruit Chan s Made in Hong Kong written by Esther M.K. Cheung and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tragic coming-of-age story follows three disillusioned local youths struggling to navigate Hong Kong public housing projects and late adolescence amid violent crime, gang pressure, and broken homes. Shot on a very low budget, the film marked the beginning of Chan's career as an independent film director.
Download or read book Peter Ho Sun Chan s He s a Woman She s a Man written by Lisa Odham Stokes and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comedy confronts social stereotypes of masculine females, male anxieties about homosexuality and the limits of female femininity. The book also offers background on comedic narrative structure in Cantonese opera and other traditional sources that have influenced Hong Kong cinema.
Download or read book Hong Kong Film Hollywood and New Global Cinema written by Gina Marchetti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-01-24 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Positioning Art Cinema written by Geoff King and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art cinema occupies a space in the film landscape that is accorded a particular kind of value. From films that claim the status of harsh realism to others which embody aspects of the tradition of modernism or the poetic, art cinema encompasses a variety of work from across the globe. But how is art cinema positioned in the film marketplace, or by critics and in academic analysis? Exactly what kinds of cultural value are attributed to films of this type and how can this be explained? This book offers a unique analysis of how such processes work, including the broader cultural basis of the appeal of art cinema to particular audiences. Geoff King argues that there is no single definition of art cinema, but a number of distinct and recurrent tendencies are identified. At one end of the spectrum are films accorded the most 'heavyweight' status, offering the greatest challenges to viewers. Others mix aspects of art cinema with more accessible dimensions such as uses of popular genre frameworks and 'exploitation' elements involving explicit sex and violence. Including case studies of key figures such as Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, this is a crucial contribution to understanding both art cinema itself and the discourses through which its value is established.
Download or read book More Sex Better Zen Faster Bullets written by Stefan Hammond and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 899 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why did films from Hong Kong — a former British Crown Colony and map-speck — become so popular? Post-WWII, creative freedom was scarce in Asia, but Hong Kong was a safe space for filmmakers seeking to profit from overseas Chinese markets and Chinatowns worldwide. Both Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest set up massive operations in Hong Kong and let the celluloid slip. By the 1980s, Hong Kong's Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan were famous throughout Asia. Their winning formula of humour and martial arts prowess ripped through kung fu stereotypes, while filmmakers like Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam served up fantasy, horror and noir crime dramas for rabid cinemagoing hordes in the grindhouses of Kowloon. It was a glorious time. This book is the nonpareil true story of the Hong Kong film industry, one that doesn’t skimp on the good bits: the hyperkinetic films themselves. Included are intrepid firsthand accounts of the culture and international fanbases to have emerged around these movies. More Sex, Better Zen, Faster Bullets contains the best bits of Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head (1996) and Hollywood East (2000) — the two best known tomes on Hong Kong films of the twentieth century — revised and with the inclusion of new material. The result is the most comprehensive encyclopedia of Hong Kong film available anywhere.
