Download or read book The Asian Influence on Hollywood Action Films written by Barna William Donovan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-09-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filmmakers of the Pacific Rim have been delivering punches and flying kicks to the Hollywood movie industry for years. This book explores the ways in which the storytelling and cinematic techniques of Asian popular culture have migrated from grainy, low-budget martial arts movies to box-office blockbusters such as The Magnificent Seven, Star Wars, The Matrix and Transformers. While special effects gained prominence, the raw and gritty power of live combat emerged as an audience favorite, spawning Asian stars Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and martial arts-trained stars Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal. As well as capturing the sheer onscreen adrenaline rush that characterizes the films discussed, this work explores the impact of violent cinematic entertainment and why it is often misunderstood. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book Hong Kong Connections written by Meaghan Morris and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, Hong Kong cinema has helped to shape one of the world's most popular cultural genres: action cinema. Hong Kong action films have proved popular over the decades with audiences worldwide, and they have seized the imaginations of filmmakers working in many different cultural traditions and styles. How do we account for this appeal, which changes as it crosses national borders? Hong Kong Connections brings leading film scholars together to explore the uptake of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, Korea, India, Australia, France and the US as well as its links with Taiwan, Singapore and the Chinese mainland. In the process, this collective study examines diverse cultural contexts for action cinema's popularity, and the problems involved in the transnational study of globally popular forms suggesting that in order to grasp the history of Hong Kong action cinema's influence we need to bring out the differences as well as the links that constitute popularity.
Download or read book A Companion to the Action Film written by James Kendrick and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-01-25 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative guide to the action-packed film genre With 24 incisive, cutting-edge contributions from esteemed scholars and critics, A Companion to the Action Filmprovides an authoritative and in-depth guide to this internationally popular and wide-ranging genre. As the first major anthology on the action film in more than a decade, the volume offers insights into the genre’s historical development, explores its production techniques and visual poetics, and provides reflections on the numerous social, cultural, and political issues it has and continues to embody. A Companion to the Action Film offers original research and critical analysis that examines the iconic characteristics of the genre, its visual aesthetics, and its narrative traits; considers the impact of major directors and stars on the genre’s evolution; puts the action film in dialogue with various technologies and other forms of media such as graphic novels and television; and maps out new avenues of critical study for the future. This important resource: Offers a definitive guide to the action film Contains insightful contributions from a wide range of international film experts and scholars Reviews the evolution of the genre from the silent era to today’s age of digital blockbusters Offers nuanced commentary and analysis of socio-cultural issues such as race, nationality, and gender in action films Written for scholars, teachers and students in film studies, film theory, film history, genre studies, and popular culture, A Companion to the Action Film is an essential guide to one of international cinema’s most important, popular, and influential genres.
Download or read book Warrior Women written by Lisa Funnell and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-05-19 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2014 ForeWord IndieFab Book of the Year Award in the Women's Studies Category Bronze Medalist, 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Women Issues Category Winnerof the 2015 Emily Toth Award presented by the Popular Culture Association & American Culture Association Warrior Women considers the significance of Chinese female action stars in martial arts films produced across a range of national and transnational contexts. Lisa Funnell examines the impact of the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule on the representation of Chinese identities—Hong Kong Chinese, mainland Chinese, Chinese American, Chinese Canadian—in action films produced domestically in Hong Kong and, increasingly, in cooperation with mainland China and Hollywood. Hong Kong cinema has offered space for the development of transnational Chinese screen identities that challenge the racial stereotypes historically associated with the Asian female body in the West. The ethnic/national differentiation of transnational Chinese female stars—such as Pei Pei Cheng, Charlene Choi, Gong Li, Lucy Liu, Shu Qi, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi—is considered part of the ongoing negotiation of social, cultural, and geopolitical identities in the Chinese-speaking world.
Download or read book Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory written by Nick Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book applies the discourse of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ to popular contemporary cinema, in particular the action sequences of twenty-first century Hollywood productions. Tackling a variety of spatial imaginations (contemporary iconic architecture; globalisation and non-places; phenomenological knowledge of place; consumerist spaces of commodity purchase; cyberspace), the diverse case studies not only detail the range of ways in which action sequences represent the challenge of surviving and acting in contemporary space, but also reveal the consistent qualities of spatial appropriation and spatial manipulation that define the form. Jones argues that action sequences dramatise the restrictions and possibilities of space, offering examples of radical spatial praxis through their depictions of spatial engagement, struggle and eventual transcendence.
Download or read book The Asian Film Industry written by John A. Lent and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American and Chinese Language Cinemas written by Lisa Funnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics frequently describe the influence of "America," through Hollywood and other cultural industries, as a form of cultural imperialism. This unidirectional model of interaction does not address, however, the counter-flows of Chinese-language films into the American film market or the influence of Chinese filmmakers, film stars, and aesthetics in Hollywood. The aim of this collection is to (re)consider the complex dynamics of transnational cultural flows between American and Chinese-language film industries. The goal is to bring a more historical perspective to the subject, focusing as much on the Hollywood influence on early Shanghai or postwar Hong Kong films as on the intensifying flows between American and Chinese-language cinemas in recent decades. Contributors emphasize the processes of appropriation and reception involved in transnational cultural practices, examining film production, distribution, and reception.
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 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, with the establishment of the Hong Kong Film Archive and growing scholarly interest in the history of Hong Kong cinema, previously neglected historical documents and difficult-to-access films have offered new research materials. As Hong Kong film history comes into sharper focus, its inextricable links across the decades to Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, the United States, and to the far reaches of the Chinese diaspora have also become more evident. Hong Kong’s connection with Hollywood involves ties that bring together art cinema and popular genres as well as film festivals and the media marketplace with popular transnational genres. Giving fresh and facsinating insights into the vibrant area of Hong Kong, this exciting new book links Hong Kong with world film culture both within and beyond the commercial Hollywood paradigm. It emphasizes Hong Kong film in relation to other cinema industries, including Hollywood, and demonstrates that Hong Kong film, throughout its history, has challenged, redefined, expanded, and exceeded its borders.
Download or read book East Asian Cinemas written by Leon Hunt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinemas from East Asia are among the most exciting and influential in the world. They are attracting popular and critical attention on a global scale, with films from the region circulating as art house, cult, blockbuster and 'extreme' cinema, or as Hollywood remakes. This book explores developments in the global popularity of East Asian cinema, from Chinese martial arts, through Japanese horror, to the burgeoning new Korean cinema, with particular emphasis on crossovers, remakes, hybrids and co-productions. It examines changing cinematic traditions in Asia alongside the 'Asianisation' of western cinema. It explores the dialogue not only between 'East' and 'West', but between different cinemas in the Asia Pacific. What do these trends mean for global cinema? How are co-productions and crossover films changing the nature of Hollywood and East Asian cinemas? The book includes in-depth studies of Park Chan-wook, 'Infernal Affairs', 'Seven Samurai', and 'Princess Mononoke'.
Download or read book Sinascape written by Gary G. Xu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a comprehensive study of Chinese-language films at the turn of the millennium. Emphasizing the transnational nature of contemporary Chinese cinema, it provides close readings of most of the important films of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and explores the interactions and transactions among these films and between Chinese cinema and Hollywood. General readers, film enthusiasts, and critics will all benefit from Gary Xu's discussion of popular films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle, Devils on the Doorstep, Suzhou River, Beijing Bicycle, Millennium Mambo, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Hollywood Hong Kong.
Download or read book Hong Kong Action Cinema written by Bey Logan and published by Overlook Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dazzling choreography of martial arts movies to the gore of the "heroic bloodshed" genre, Hong Kong action films are masterpieces of style and fury, and a prime source of inspiration for Hollywood. Tracing the background of this enticing film genre from the influences of Chinese opera to the mixture of fantasy and fast-paced action of the present day style, this is essential reading for both the intrigued layman and the die-hard Hong Kong fan. Photos, 95 in color.
Download or read book Fighting without Fighting written by Luke White and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From classic Bruce Lee films to the comedies of Jackie Chan, a vibrant look at the enduring fascination with the kung fu cinema of Hong Kong. In the spring and summer of 1973, a wave of martial arts movies from Hong Kong—epitomized by Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon—smashed box-office records for foreign-language films in America and ignited a “kung fu craze” that swept the world. Fighting without Fighting explores this dramatic phenomenon, and it argues that, more than just a cinematic fad, the West’s sudden fascination with—and moral panic about—the Asian fighting arts left lasting legacies still present today. The book traces the background of the craze in the longer development of Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema. It discusses the key films in detail, as well as their popular reception and the debates they ignited, where kung fu challenged Western identities and raised anxieties about violence, both on and off-screen. And it examines the proliferation of ideas and images from these films in fields as diverse as popular music, superhero franchises, children’s cartoons, and contemporary art. Illuminating and accessible, Fighting without Fighting draws a vivid bridge between East and West.
Download or read book Remaking Chinese Cinema written by Yiman Wang and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multilocal process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through transregional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema. Among the book’s highlights are a rereading of The Goddess—one of the best-known silent Chinese films in the West—from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood’s fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood’s remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of “Chinese elements” in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach, a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalization. As such, Remaking Chinese Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.
Download or read book The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora written by Kin-Yan Szeto and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2011-06-29 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora, Kin-Yan Szeto critically examines three of the most internationally famous martial arts film artists to arise out of the Chinese diaspora and travel far from their homelands to find commercial success in the world at large: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan. Positing the idea that these filmmakers' success is evidence of a "cosmopolitical awareness" arising from their cross-cultural ideological engagements and geopolitical displacements, Szeto demonstrates how this unique perspective allows these three filmmakers to develop and act in the transnational environment of media production, distribution, and consumption. Beginning with a historical retrospective on Chinese martial arts films as a diasporic film genre and the transnational styles and ideologies of the filmmakers themselves, Szeto uses case studies to explore in depth how the forces of colonialism, Chinese nationalism, and Western imperialism shaped the identities and work of Lee, Woo, and Chan. Addressed in the volume is the groundbreaking martial arts swordplay film that achieves global success-Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon- and its revelations about Hollywood representations of Asians, as well as concepts of male and female masculinity in the swordplay film tradition. Also investigated is the invigoration of contemporary gangster, thriller, and war films by John Woo, whose combination of artistic and historical contexts has contributed to his global success. Szeto then dissects Chan's mimetic representation of masculinity in his films, and the influences of his Chinese theater and martial arts training on his work. Szeto outlines the similarities and differences between the three artists' films, especially their treatments of gender, sexuality, and power. She concludes by analyzing their films as metaphors for their working conditions in the Chinese diaspora and Hollywood, and demonstrating how through their works, Lee, Woo, and Chan communicate not only with the rest of the world but also with each other. Far from a book simply about three filmmakers, The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora investigates the transnational nature of films, the geopolitics of culture and race, and the depths of masculinity and power in movies. Szeto's interdisciplinary approach calls for nothing less than a paradigm shift in the study of Chinese diasporic filmmakers and the embodiment of cosmopolitical perspectives in the martial arts genre.
Download or read book Like Water written by Daryl Joji Maeda and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bruce Lee embodies the intermixture of cultures that results from transnational flows of people, ideas, and capital. Born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, his life was one of constant shuttling across the Pacific. Rather than being a product of California or China, he was produced by transpacific currents impelled by colonialism, capitalism, and militarism. In his life, career, and films he faced and addressed racism and colonialism. He shattered national, racial, and cultural boundaries in his martial arts practice, personal life, and films. His philosophy of intermixture can be tracked by studying how his fighting style evolved, driven by his ethos of absorbing influences from around the globe. He defied US discrimination against interracial marriage by marrying a white woman and embraced cultural hybridity in raising their children. In Hollywood, he broke ground as an Asian American on television and when racism stymied his career, he revolutionized filmmaking by combining aesthetics and influences drawn from both Hong Kong and Hollywood. Nearly half a century after his tragic death at the age of 32, Bruce Lee continues to inspire people around the globe as a symbol of innovation, determination, and pursuit of justice"--
Download or read book The Influence of Chinese Action Film on Contemporary American Cinema written by Wei Koh and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Out of the Shadows written by Roger Garcia and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
