Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong


Book Description

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.




Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong


Book Description

The books takes an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong, using perspectives ranging from sociology, history, film studies, cultural and critical theories, and globalization studies.




What's Eating You?


Book Description

Divided into four thematic sections, What's Eating You? explores the deeper significance of food on screen-the ways in which they reflect (or challenge) our deepest fears about consuming and being consumed. Among the questions it asks are: How do these films mock our taboos and unsettle our notions about the human condition? How do they critique our increasing focus on consumption? In what ways do they hold a mirror to our taken-for-granteds about food and humanity, asking if what we eat truly matters? Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous “others” dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.




Hong Kong Screenscapes


Book Description

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.




New Hong Kong Cinema


Book Description

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.




Fruit Chan's Durian Durian


Book Description

This book examines how Fruit Chan's Durian Durian sensitively portrays the unsettling seismic shifts affecting the inhabitants of both China and Hong Kong in a post-1997 context. The study covers different aspects of Durian Durian: its relation to the Hong Kong independent film sector and traditions of Hong Kong social realism; its representations of mainland Chinese women; and its representations of cross-border relations and issues of post-1997 identity for both inhabitants of Hong Kong and China. Gan argues that Durian Durian is an attempt to re-think Hong Kong and China as a single entity, a single imagined community in a post-1997 era. The film is an exploration of "one country, two systems" not just in political but in spatial and affective terms. This is one of the first studies of Fruit Chan's work and presents him as one of Hong Kong's key filmmakers, worthy of serious critical study. Durian Durian is one of Chan's masterpieces and its study is of interest to anyone who is concerned with post-1997 realities in Hong Kong and China as visualized on film.




Transnational Cinematography Studies


Book Description

Transnational Cinematography Studies introduces new perspectives to the discipline of film and media studies. First, this volume focuses on a crucial yet largely unexplored area in film and media studies: the substantial communication between critical studies of cinema and film production practices. This book integrates theories and practices of cinematographic technology. Secondly, Transnational Cinematography Studies expands the scope of film and media studies into the arena of transnationalism. Cinema is now discussed in terms of globalization of audio-visual cultures, with regard to such issues as Hollywood film studios’ so-called “runaway productions” and multi-national co-productions; Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films or Hong-Kong martial arts films; and the growing significance of international film festivals. However, this volume proposes that globalization is not in itself new in the history of cinema, and that cinema has always been at the forefront of transnational culture from the beginning of its history.




Sinascape


Book Description

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.




Chinese Ecocinema


Book Description

This anthology is a book-length study of China's ecosystem through the lens of cinema. Proposing 'ecocinema' as a new critical framework, the volume collectively investigates a wide range of urgent topics in today's world.




Hong Kong


Book Description

Hong Kong has always been something of an anomaly, and an outpost of empire, whether British or Chinese. Once described as a barren island, the former fishing community has been transformed by its own economic miracle into one of Asia's World Cities, taking in its stride the territory's 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty. Beneath the surface of Hong Kong's clichéd self-image as Pearl of the Orient and Shopping Paradise, Michael Ingham reveals a city rich in history, myth, and cultural diversity.