Karen Fang

Arresting Cinema

Surveillance in Hong Kong Film

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Karen Fang is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and a member of the Film Committee for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Januar 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 157mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 476g
• ISBN-13: 9780804798914
• ISBN-10: 0804798915
• Artikelnr.: 45001403

Autorenporträt

Karen Fang is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and a member of the Film Committee for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: A Race of Peeping Toms? "Rear Window Ethics" in Hong Kong
chapter abstract
World film is rife with surveillance motifs, but the current canon of
surveillance cinema is, like surveillance theory, overly Western-centric.
The Introduction exposes and amends this problem by presenting Hong Kong
cinema's rich tradition of surveillance motifs. Exploring local film
traditions such as gambling and tenement movies, this chapter shows how and
why Hong Kong cinema often depicts surveillance with a tolerance and
enthusiasm very different from that of the best-known Western movies on the
same subject. Using fascinating local films such as a 1955 Hong Kong remake
of Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window, this chapter tracks
surveillance's shaping role in the aesthetics and narratives of one of the
world's most vibrant cinemas outside Hollywood.
1Watching the Watchman: Michael Hui's Surveillance Comedies
chapter abstract
Comedy is as underrepresented in surveillance cinema as are non-Western
movies, facts that underscore the films of beloved Hong Kong comedian
Michael Hui. His chart-topping hits like Games Gamblers Play (1974), The
Private Eyes (1976), and Security Unlimited (1982) display an unusually
lighthearted view of surveillance and were popular throughout Asia and
Europe. Providing one of the most-focused studies in Western writing on
Hui's film oeuvre, this chapter claims that what appears to be a
specifically Hong Kong emphasis on enabling surveillance was instrumental
to the comedian's international success. Recalling Charlie Chaplin's Modern
Times (1936) in their ability to fashion comedy from industrial and
capitalist surveillance, Hui's films exemplify the "vernacular modernism"
of early American silent comedy and present the star himself as the
preeminent example of Hong Kong cinema's frequent emphasis on
surveillance's economic and professional opportunities.
2On the "China Watch": Prosperity and Paranoia in Reunification-Era Cinema
chapter abstract
The action and crime films at the industry's height in the 1980s and early
1990s are perhaps the best-known examples of Hong Kong film and provide an
obvious site of local cinema's surveillance imagery. Although rarely noted
as surveillance per se, its resonance with Hong Kong's impending 1997
reunification with China was often the focus of critical interest in the
genre, which exhibited an anticommunist Sinophobia subsequently rejected by
an alternative critical emphasis on other genres and local contexts. This
chapter revisits these films and critical debate by showing how the
original interest in surveillance was correct in intuitively recognizing
surveillance themes present in local culture and cinema since the Cold War.
Tracing contrasting surveillance regimes both in action and crime movies
and in other prominent nonaction films from the era, this chapter argues
that reunification intensified surveillance themes long central to Hong
Kong and Hong Kong film.
3"Only" a Policeman: Joint Venture Cinema and the Mediatization of the
chapter abstract
Although police plots and cop images are global film conventions, as a form
of surveillance cinema their intersections with actual police practice are
little documented. Hong Kong, however, has long harbored a Dragnet-type
police-media symbiosis, as this chapter shows by tracking diverse official
and commercial media such as Jackie Chan action movies, a mid-1970s-era
police recruitment film, and a cycle of reunification-era movies about
collaborations between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese police. Exploring
this well-known but undertheorized history of Hong Kong's mutually
beneficial relationship between police and entertainment, this chapter
shows how Hong Kong's cinematic police images are themselves symptoms of
the force's success in normalizing surveillance into daily life.
4"Representing the Chinese Government": Hong Kong Undercover in An Age of
Self-Censorship
chapter abstract
Recent studies of Hong Kong cinema's fate in the face of China's emergence
as the world's largest film market emphasize a dialectical choice between
collaborative dapian (big movie) that promote Greater China or much smaller
movies targeted only at local Hong Kong audiences. Such accounts, however,
overlook local cinema's tradition of globally accessible but locally
resonant undercover-cop movies, which since Infernal Affairs continue to be
a lucrative subgenre. This chapter explores recent Hong Kong undercover
movies such as Overheard and Drug War and an as-yet-unremarked subgenre
dubbed "period undercover" to show how the cinema subverts current Chinese
political and economic ascendancy. Tracking how recent Hong Kong undercover
movies fuse highly local content with a Hollywoodized accessibility, this
chapter claims that despite the industry's initial decline and subsequent
retraction Hong Kong film continues to be at the forefront of global cinema
and surveillance trends.
Conclusion: Toward a Global Surveillance Cinema
chapter abstract
Hong Kong cinema exemplifies the insights that arise when the existing
surveillance cinema canon is expanded to encompass the full range of world
film. Although few film industries outside Hollywood can match Hong Kong's
in its productivity and global influence, film cycles and subgenres
throughout a variety of cinemas in Spain, South Korea, and Bombay show how
surveillance ethics and aesthetics are experienced in spaces outside a
dominant culture. The Conclusion reviews the prescience by which Hong
Kong's seemingly idiosyncratic surveillance cinema engages global
surveillance culture. Touching on a 2010 film, 72 Tenants of Prosperity,
and connecting it to both the 2014 Umbrella movement and Edward Snowden's
2013 flight to Hong Kong, the Conclusion uses Hong Kong to advocate for a
more diverse canon of world surveillance cinema.