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Infernal Affairs has received journalistic, popular and corporate notice but little vigorous critical attention. This book explores the way this example of Hong Kong's cinematic eclecticism has crossed borders as a story, a commercial product and a work of art; and has had an undeniable impact on current Hong Kong cinema. Moreover the author uses this film to highlight the way Hong Kong cinema continues to be inextricably intertwined with global film culture and the transnational movie market.

The pioneering independent filmmaker Ann On-wah Hui has drawn much acclaim for her sensitive portrayals of numerous Hong Kong tragedies and marginalized populations. In a career spanning three decades, Hui has been director, producer, writer, and actress for more than thirty films. This work analyzes 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 resonated 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 favorite among returning Hong Kong emigrants and international cinema students alike.

In coming decades, film will be one of the primary ways in which China adopts and expands ecological consciousness. This anthology is a book-length study of China's ecosystem through the lens of cinema, in an historic moment of unparalleled environmental crises and destruction. Proposing “ecocinema” as a new critical framework, the volume collectively investigates a wide range of urgent topics in today's world: Chinese and Western epistemes of nature and humanity; socialist modernization amid capitalist globalization; shifting configurations of space, locale, cityscape, and natural landscape; gender, religion, and ethnic cultures; as well as bioethics and environmental politics. Individual chapters zero in on diverse Chinese-language films by directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Fruit Chan, Wu Tianming, Tsai Ming-liang, Li Yang, Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Yang, Wang Xiaoshuai, Wang Bing, Ning Hao, Zhang Ming, Dai Sijie, Wanma Caidan, and Huo Jianqi.

Cinema has been a primary mechanism for entertaining migrants to the modern city, recording and displaying a historically new experience to urban populations themselves, while also disseminating the city's promise around the world. But recent city films betray an awareness that the experience of urban life has changed with the dynamic energies and burdens of globalization, with the era of digital video now upon us, and with the emergence of almost limitless megacities throughout East Asia. Contemporary films from the region help define the urban experience in these new environments. This book traces common concerns among East Asian cinemas of Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the PRC, and Taiwan, and go beyond the now familiar notion that the Asian metropolises are successful iterations of local identity within a global network.

One of the most prominent directors in Hong Kong at the moment, Johnnie To Kei-fung, has over the past few years been receiving more attention at film festivals globally with films such as Breaking News (2004), Election I & II (2005–2006), Exiled (2006), The Mad Detective (2007), and most recently, Sparrow (2008). Sometimes referred to as the post-1997 poet of Hong Kong, To has a career that actually goes back as far as the 1980s, and as one of the few directors to keep up a high output even after the local film industry started to decline, his CV now boasts close to 50 films. Writing a monograph on To is therefore no easy task, but this book provides an overview of Johnnie To's career, concentrating on his action films, the genre in which To has excelled. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between directory 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.

This book is about Fruit Chan's film Made in Hong Kong (1997), a tragic coming-of-age story which 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.

Global connections and screen innovations converge in Hong Kong cinema. This volume focuses on the film clubs of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as well as new waves since, that have both refreshed and ruptured Hong Kong screenscapes. Energized by transnational image 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, galleries, and internet sites, reveals many differences within global cultural distributions, as well as distinctive tensions between experimental media artists and traditional screen architects, social participation, censorship, and flexible citizenship.

This book compares production and consumption of Asian horror cinemas in different national contexts and their multidirectional dialogues with Hollywood and neighboring Asian cultures. Chapters highlight common themes including technology, digital media, adolescent audience sensibilities, transnational co-productions, pan-Asian marketing techniques, and variations on good vs. evil evident.

In the two decades since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia cinema has become one of the most productive and exciting film industries in Asia. From a position in the 1990s when local films were on the cultural periphery, they are now part of the mainstream with two new films in the cinemas every week. This book traces how the film industry reformed and returned to popularity and conceptualises it as a process of going mainstream. It overturns long held paradigms of national cinema and statism to see the film industry as pop culture in which market mechanisms are determinant. In going mainstream, new independent-minded filmmakers representing new creativity had to accommodate with capital and producers from old production companies. Appeal to audiences has resulting in the reimagining of the horror film and its traumas and the representation of new kinds of piety in a new subgenre Islamic themed films. Yet legacy structures and players remain, as the film industry has struggled to overcome regulation and censorship and the oligopoly of senior producers. In catering to a growing audience, the exhibition sector has become the focus of new investment as it becomes a site for competing local operators and global capital. The book argues for a reconceptualization of Indonesian cinema as pop culture with consequences to how Asian cinema is studied.

Japan's film industry has gone through dramatic changes in recent decades, as international consumer forces and transnational talent have brought unprecedented engagement with global trends. With careful research and unique first-person observations drawn from years of working within the international industry of Japanese film, this book aims to examine how different generations of Japanese filmmakers engaged and interacted with the structural opportunities and limitations posed by external forces, and how their subjectivity has been shaped by their transnational experiences and has changed as a result. Having been through the globalization of the last part of the twentieth century, are Japanese themselves and overseas consumers of Japanese culture really becoming more cosmopolitan? If so, what does this mean for Japan's national culture and the traditional sense of national belonging among Japanese people?

This book tells the story of the “Emperor of Film”, who dominated the golden age of Chinese silent movies. Jin Yan achieved his greatest stardom in the 1930s, when women literally threw themselves at his feet. Married first to the Chinese actress Wang Renmei, his movie roles with “the Goddess” Ruan Ling-yu spurred public demand for more of them together in films made by the leading studio, Lianhua. It was Jin who made Ruan aware of film's awesome power to portray social problems while evading the censors with melodramatic soap opera formats. Jin's life spanned the most turbulent period in modern Chinese history — a childhood escape from Japanese-occupied Korea, through the long civil war, the bitter Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's reformation. Jin's embodiment of the modernizing May Fourth ideals of the 1920s and 30s added a new layer of sexuality to the liberal movement, but the Communists later cast Jin aside in their campaign to “learn from Lei Feng”, a humble young soldier. As Jin's second wife Qin Yi rose to new heights in the politically charged film world, the sick and aging star languished in obscurity. This book reproduces dozens of stills from the personal collection of Qin Yi and the China Film Archive, and contextualizes Jin's tragic transformation with details on many fellow performers.

Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema now come to an end? However this question is answered, there is a need to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong Cinema. This book distinguishes itself from the other books on the subject by focusing in-depth on individual Hong Kong films, which together make the New Hong Kong Cinema. Though underappreciated in contemporary film criticism, Bullet in the Head is a landmark in John Woo's career as a film director.

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 amid the 2003 SARS panic, the film evokes Hong Kong's post-handover economic despair and multiple identity crises. This book argues that PTU is the most aesthetically rigorous and satisfying of To's many films in terms of character development and psychological complexity.

A Touch of Zen is one of the first Chinese-language films to gain recognition in an international film festival (the Grand Prix in the 1975 Cannes Film Festival), creating the generic mould for the crossover success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000. The film has achieved a cult status over the years but little has been written about it. This first book-length study of the classic martial arts film therefore redresses its critical neglect, and explores its multi-leveled dimensions and mysteries. One of the central features of the film is the enigmatic knight-lady whose quest for revenge leads her to cross paths with a poor scholar whose interest in military strategy seals their alliance. The author discusses the psychological manifestations and implications of this relationship and concludes that the film's continuing relevance lies in its portrait of sexuality and the feminist desires of the heroine. He also analyzes the film's form as an action piece and the director's preoccupation with Zen as a creative inspiration and as a subject in its own right. As such, he argues that the film is a highly unconventional and idiosyncratic work which attempts to transcend its own genre and reach the heights of universal transcendence. He grounds his study in both Western and Chinese literary sources, providing a broad and comprehensive treatise based on the film's narrative concepts and symbols.

South Korean masculinities have enjoyed dramatic influence in pan-Asian popular culture, which travels freely due to its non-nationalistic appeal. This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figures: the middle-aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the horror film Oldboy, and the Singaporean fandom of the popstar Rain. Through these three specific but hybrid masculine contexts, the author develops the concepts of soft masculinity, as well as global and postmodern variants of masculine cultural impacts. The author argues that Korean masculinity is being reconstructed through its regional and sometimes global circulation as part of the Korean Wave, producing new forms that negotiate local Korean forces and international consumer forces to create culturally odorless forms that travel easily and find ready consumption.

A distinctive feature of post-war Japanese cinema is the frequent recurrence of imagistic and narrative tropes and formulaic characterizations in female representations. These repetitions are important, Jennifer Coates asserts, because sentiments and behaviours forbidden during the war and post-war social and political changes were often articulated by or through the female image. Moving across major character types, from mothers to daughters, and schoolteachers to streetwalkers, Making Icons studies the role of the media in shaping the attitudes of the general public. Japanese cinema after defeat in the Asia Pacific War and World War II is shown to be an important ground where social experiences were explored, reworked, and eventually accepted or rejected by audiences emotionally invested in these repetitive materials. An examination of 600 films produced and distributed between 1945 and 1964, as well as numerous Japanese-language sources, forms the basis of this rigorous study. Making Icons draws on an art-historical iconographic analysis to explain how viewers derive meanings from images during this peak period of film production and attendance in Japan.

The martial arts film, despite being long regarded as a vehicle of Chinese cultural nationalism, can also paradoxically be conceptualized as a mass cultural expression of Hong Kong’s colonial-capitalist modernity. Moving beyond generalized notions of martial arts cinema’s appeal, this book argues that the important and popular genre 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 an original conceptual framework for the study of Hong Kong martial arts cinema and shedding light on the nexus between social change and cultural/aesthetic form, this book offers perceptive analyses of individual films—not just the canonical works of King Hu, Chang Cheh, and Bruce Lee, but many lesser-known ones by Lau Kar-leung and Chor Yuen, among others.

This book offers an innovative study of three provocative Chinese directors: Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang, whose highly stylized and non-linear configurations of time have brought new global respect for Chinese cinema. Amplifying motifs of loss, nostalgia, haunting, and ephemeral poetics, they each insist on the significance of being out of time, not merely out of place, as a condition of global modernity and transnational cultures of memory.

Depictions within a movie of either filmmaking or film watching are hardly novel, but the dramatic expansion of the reach of the metacinematic into contemporary Chinese cinemas is nothing short of remarkable. The prevalence of metacinematic features forms the basis of a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. Such a discourse, in turn, outlines the boundaries of the possible for film in China as aesthetic or sociopolitical practice. Metacinema also draws our attention to the presence of the audience, people actively responding to a film. In elucidating the affective responses elicited by the metacinematic mode in the viewers, Stuckey argues that metacinema reflects ways of being in the world that audiences may take up for themselves. The films studied in this book are drawn across the full spectrum of Chinese films made in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the 1990s and 2000s, from award-winning conceptual art films to popular crowd pleasers, blockbusters to low budget productions, and documentary-style social realist exposé projects to studio assembly line investments. The recurrence of the metacinematic across this broad range of works is indicative of its relevance to Chinese films today, and the analysis of these diverse examples allows us to gauge the cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of Chinese cinemas as a whole.

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement is a project unveiling recent documentary film work that has transformed visual culture in China, and brought new immediacy along with a broader base of participation to Chinese media. This volume provides an introduction to the topic of Chinese documentary film, the signature mode of contemporary Chinese visual culture. The chapters here examine how documentary filmmakers have opened up a unique new space of social commentary and critique in an era of rapid social changes amid globalization and marketization. They cover topics ranging from cruelty in documentary to the representation of Beijing: gay, lesbian, and queer documentary; sound in documentary; the exhibition context in China; authorial intervention and subjectivity; and the distinctive “on the spot” aesthetics of contemporary Chinese documentary.