Download Books and Ebooks (PDF / EPUB)

Chinese Martial Arts Cinema

Author: Stephen Teo

Number of pages: 240

This is the first comprehensive, fully-researched account of the historical and contemporary development of the traditional martial arts genre in the Chinese cinema known as wuxia (literal translation: martial chivalry) - a genre which audiences around the world became familiar with through the phenomenal 'crossover' hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The book unveils rich layers of the wuxia tradition as it developed in the early Shanghai cinema in the late 1920s, and from the 1950s onwards, in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries. Key attractions of the book are analyses of:*The history of the tradition as it began in the Shanghai cinema, its rise and popularity as a serialized form in the silent cinema of the late 1920s, and its eventual prohibition by the government in 1931.*The fantastic characteristics of the genre, their relationship with folklore, myth and religion, and their similarities and differences with the kung fu sub-genre of martial arts cinema.*The protagonists and heroes of the genre, in particular the figure of the female knight-errant.*The chief personalities and masterpieces of the genre - directors such as King Hu, Chu Yuan, Zhang Che, Ang Lee,...

Chinese Martial Arts Cinema

Author: Stephen Teo

This is the first comprehensive, fully-researched account of the historical and contemporary development of the traditional martial arts genre in the Chinese cinema known as wuxia.

King Hu's A Touch of Zen

Author: Stephen Teo

Number of pages: 196

A Touch of Zen is one of the first Chinese-language films to gain recognition in an international film festival (the Grand Prix at 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 (xia nü) whose quest for revenge leads her to cross paths with a poor scholar whose interest in military strategy seals their alliance. Teo 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. Teo 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...

Chinese Martial Arts Film and the Philosophy of Action

Author: Stephen Teo

Number of pages: 174

This book focuses on the philosophy of Chinese martial arts film, arguing that philosophy provides a key to understanding the whole genre. It draws on Chinese philosophical ideas derived from, or based on, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and other schools of thought such as Mohism and Legalism, examines a cluster of recent Chinese martial arts films centering on the figure of the xia—the heroic protagonist, the Chinese equivalent of medieval Europe’s knight-errant—and outlines the philosophical principles and themes undergirding the actions of xia and their narratives. Overall, the author argues that the genre, apart from being an action-oriented entertainment medium, is inherently moral and ethical.

Hong Kong Cinema

Author: Stephen Teo

Number of pages: 319

This is the first full-length English-language study of one of the world's most exciting and innovative cinemas. Covering a period from 1909 to 'the end of Hong Kong cinema' in the present day, this book features information about the films, the studios, the personalities and the contexts that have shaped a cinema famous for its energy and style. It includes studies of the films of King Hu, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, as well as those of John Woo and the directors of the various 'New Waves'. Stephen Teo explores this cinema from both Western and Chinese perspectives and encompasses genres ranging from melodrama to martial arts, 'kung fu', fantasy and horror movies, as well as the international art-house successes.

Chinese Martial Arts Cinema

Author: Stephen Teo

Number of pages: 272

This is the first comprehensive, fully-researched account of the historical and contemporary development of the traditional martial arts genre in the Chinese cinema known as wuxia (literal translation: martial chivalry) - a genre which audiences around the world became familiar with through the phenomenal 'crossover' hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The book unveils rich layers of the wuxia tradition as it developed in the early Shanghai cinema in the late 1920s, and from the 1950s onwards, in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries. Key attractions of the book are analyses of:*The history of the tradition as it began in the Shanghai cinema, its rise and popularity as a serialized form in the silent cinema of the late 1920s, and its eventual prohibition by the government in 1931.*

The Chinese Cinema Book

Author: Song Hwee Lim , Julian Ward

Number of pages: 336

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.

Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity

Author: Man-Fung Yip

Number of pages: 240

At the core of Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation is a fascinating paradox: the martial arts film, long regarded as a vehicle of Chinese cultural nationalism, can also be understood as a mass cultural expression of Hong Kong’s modern urban-industrial society. This important and popular genre, Man-Fung Yip argues, 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 a novel 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, including not only the canonical works of King Hu, Chang Cheh, and Bruce Lee, but also many lesser-known ones by Lau Kar-leung and Chor Yuen, among others, that have not been adequately discussed before. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, Yip’s stimulating study will ignite debates in new directions for both scholars and fans of Chinese-language...

Ask for the Moon

Author: Meredith Lewis

China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood

Author: Wendy Su

Number of pages: 240

In recent years, the film industry in the People's Republic of China has found itself among the top three most prolific in the world. When the Chinese government introduced a new revenue-sharing system in 1994, the nation's total movie output skyrocketed with gross box-office receipts totaling billions of yuan. This newfound success, however, has been built on an alternately competitive and collaborative relationship between the ascendant global power of China and the popular culture juggernaut of America. In China's Encounter with Global Hollywood, Wendy Su examines the intertwining relationships among the Chinese state, global Hollywood, and the Chinese film industry while analyzing the causes and consequences of the rapid growth of the nation's domestic film production. She demonstrates how the Chinese state has consolidated power by negotiating foreign interest in the lucrative Chinese market while advancing its cultural industries. Su also reveals how mainland Chinese and Hong Kong filmmakers have navigated the often-incompatible requirements of marketization and state censorship. This timely analysis demonstrates how China has cannily used global capital to modernize its own ...

Media Heterotopias

Author: Hye Jean Chung

Number of pages: 240

In Media Heterotopias Hye Jean Chung challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, Chung traces how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)—which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments—filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. Chung adapts Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, Chung reconnects digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies ...

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas

Author: Carlos Rojas , Eileen Chow

Number of pages: 709

What does it mean for a cinematic work to be "Chinese"? Does it refer specifically to a work's subject, or does it also reflect considerations of language, ethnicity, nationality, ideology, or political orientation? Such questions make any single approach to a vast field like "Chinese cinema" difficult at best. Accordingly, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas situates the term more broadly among various different phases, genres, and distinct national configurations, while taking care to address the consequences of grouping together so many disparate histories under a single banner. Offering both a platform for cross-disciplinary dialogue and a mapping of Chinese cinema as an expanded field, this Handbook presents thirty-three essays by leading researchers and scholars intent on yielding new insights and new analyses using three different methodologies. Chapters in Part I investigate the historical periodizations of the field through changing notions of national and political identity — all the way from the industry's beginnings in the 1920s up to its current forms in contemporary Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global diaspora. Chapters in Part II feature studies centered on the...

Chinese Martial Arts Film and the Philosophy of Action

Author: Stephen Teo

Number of pages: 164

This book focuses on the philosophy of Chinese martial arts film, arguing that philosophy provides a key to understanding the whole genre. It draws on Chinese philosophical ideas derived from, or based on, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and other schools of thought such as Mohism and Legalism, examines a cluster of recent Chinese martial arts films centering on the figure of the xia—the heroic protagonist, the Chinese equivalent of medieval Europe’s knight-errant—and outlines the philosophical principles and themes undergirding the actions of xia and their narratives. Overall, the author argues that the genre, apart from being an action-oriented entertainment medium, is inherently moral and ethical.

Film and Risk

Author: Mette Hjort

Number of pages: 328

An interdisciplinary collection exploring the many ways risk plays a role in film.

Asian Martial Arts

Author: Michael DeMarco

Number of pages: 200

Asian Martial Arts: Constructive Thoughts & Practical Applications represents an international gathering of friends who happen to be highly qualified martial art scholars and practitioners. This martial arts book is a collection of articles from practitioners who have come together in celebration of the 20-plus years that Journal of Asian Martial Arts has inspired scholarship to higher academic standards while encouraging all aspects of responsible practice. Each article was written specifically for Asian Martial Arts, with topics representing the rich variety found in the Asian martial traditions.

Film Studies

Author: Intellect Books

Number of pages: 450

Increasingly, academic communities transcend national boundaries. “Collaboration between researchers across space is clearly increasing, as well as being increasingly sought after,” noted the online magazine Inside Higher Ed in a recent article about research in the social sciences and humanities. Even for those scholars who don't work directly with international colleagues, staying up-to-date and relevant requires keeping up with international currents of thought in one's field. But when one's colleagues span the globe, it's not always easy to keep track of who's who—or what kind of research they're conducting. That's where Intellect's new series comes in. A set of worldwide guides to leading academics—and their work—across the arts and humanities, Who's Who in Research features comprehensive profiles of scholars in the areas of cultural studies, film studies, media studies, performing arts, and visual arts. Who's Who in Research: Film Studies includes concise yet detailed listings include each academic's name, institution, biography, and current research interests, as well as bibliographic information and a list of articles published in Intellect journals. The volumes...

Who's Who in Research: Film Studies

Author: Intellect Books

Number of pages: 540

This volume of Who’s Who in Research series offer a useful guide for current researchers in Intellect’s subject area of Film Studies. The directory holds the names, institutions, biographies and current research interests of hundreds of leading international academics as well as references to the researchers’ principal articles in Intellect journals.

Doubt, Time and Violence in Philosophical and Cultural Thought

Author: Artur K. Wardega , SJ

Number of pages: 210

As the title of the present publication suggests, the ten essays of this book try to approach an inconvenient trauma of global human reality and the uniformity of media and cyberspace in which human lives suffer harm, loss of inner identity and of broader meaning. Indeed, our postmodern and post-identity times are characterized by a flux of rapid social changes, uncertainty, vague and shaking moral values, by violence and frightening information with its contradictory truths and genuine ambiguity; finally by the violence of unpredictable climate change resulting in various and frequent calamities and devastation of life. Doubt and time are the central concern of modern philosophy and remind us that violence is inherent in the human condition and that reflection on it, regardless of different cultural sensibilities, is ipso facto part of the mainstream of our individual and global concerns. These, and many other fascinating topics from Western and Chinese history, were explored and brought to light by a learned forum of distinguished scholars and experts whose contributions are contained in this publication.

Exploiting East Asian Cinemas

Author: Ken Provencher , Mike Dillon

Number of pages: 248

From the 1970s onward, “exploitation cinema” as a concept has circulated inside and outside of East Asian nations and cultures in terms of aesthetics and marketing. However, crucial questions about how global networks of production and circulation alter the identity of an East Asian film as “mainstream” or as “exploitation” have yet to be addressed in a comprehensive way. Exploiting East Asian Cinemas serves as the first authoritative guide to the various ways in which contemporary cinema from and about East Asia has trafficked across the somewhat-elusive line between mainstream and exploitation. Focusing on networks of circulation, distribution, and reception, this collection treats the exploitation cinemas of East Asia as mobile texts produced, consumed, and in many ways re-appropriated across national (and hemispheric) boundaries. As the processes of globalization have decoupled products from their nations of origin, transnational taste cultures have declared certain works as “art” or “trash,” regardless of how those works are received within their native locales. By charting the routes of circulation of notable films from Japan, China, and South Korea, this ...

Directory of World Cinema: China

Author: Gary Bettinson

Number of pages: 233

Commended for their social relevance and artistic value, Chinese films remain at the forefront of international cinema, bolstered in recent years by a new generation of talented young filmmakers. Directory of World Cinema: China presents an accessible overview of the definitive films of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China, with particular attention to the achievements of prolific industry figures, the burgeoning independent sector, and the embrace of avant-garde practices of art cinema. Spanning a variety of characteristic genres, including horror, heroic bloodshed, romantic comedy, and kung-fu, reviews cover individual titles in considerable depth and are accompanied by a selection of full-colour film stills. A comprehensive filmography and a bibliography of recommended reading complete this essential companion to Chinese cinema.

A Brief History of the Martial Arts

Author: Jonathan Clements

Number of pages: 304

'If I had to pick a single general martial arts history book in English, I would recommend A Brief History of the Martial Arts by Dr Jonathan Clements' RICHARD BEITLICH, Martial History Team blog From Shaolin warrior monks to the movies of Bruce Lee, a new history of the evolution of East Asian styles of unarmed combat, from Kung Fu to Ninjutsu Folk tales of the Shaolin Temple depict warrior monks with superhuman abilities. Today, dozens of East Asian fighting styles trace their roots back to the Buddhist brawlers of Shaolin, although any quest for the true story soon wanders into a labyrinth of forgeries, secret texts and modern retellings. This new study approaches the martial arts from their origins in military exercises and callisthenics. It examines a rich folklore from old wuxia tales of crime-fighting heroes to modern kung fu movies. Centre stage is given to the stories that martial artists tell themselves about themselves, with accounts (both factual and fictional) of famous practitioners including China's Yim Wing-chun, Wong Fei-hong, and Ip Man, as well as Japanese counterparts such as Kano Jigoro, Itosu Anko and So Doshin. The history of martial arts encompasses secret...

Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi

Author: Adam Bingham

Number of pages: 224

This book studies the key genres in contemporary Japanese cinema through analysis of their key representative films. It considers both those films whose generic lineage is clearly definable (samurai, yakuza, horror) as well as the singularity of several recent trends in the country's filmmaking (such as magic realist filmmaking).

Shakespeare and East Asia

Author: Alexa Alice Joubin

Number of pages: 272

Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe. Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of...

Nordic Genre Film

Author: Tommy Gustafsson

Number of pages: 288

Nordic Genre Film offers a transnational approach to studying contemporary genre production in Nordic cinema.

Global Asian American Popular Cultures

Author: Shilpa Dave , LeiLani Nishime , Tasha Oren

Number of pages: 400

Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints—such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce—have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of “Asian” and “Asian American” are counterbalanced within global popular culture. Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering...

Literati Lenses

Author: Mia Yinxing Liu

Number of pages: 256

Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of inspiration. Literati Lenses explores this interplay during the Mao era, a time when cinema, at the forefront of ideological campaigns and purges, was held to strict political guidelines. Through four films—Li Shizhen (1956), Stage Sisters (1964), Early Spring in February (1963), and Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1979)—Mia Liu reveals how landscape offered an alternative text that could operate beyond political constraints and provide a portal for smuggling interesting discourses into the film. While allusions to pictorial traditions associated with a bygone era inevitably took on different meanings in the context of Mao-era cinema, cinematic engagement with literati landscape endowed films with creative and critical space as well as political poignancy. Liu not only identifies how the conventions and aesthetics of traditional literati landscape art were reinvented and mediated on multiple levels in cinema, but also explores how post-1949 Chinese filmmakers configured themselves as modern intellectuals in the spaces forged among...

The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema

Author: Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park , Gina Marchetti , See Kam Tan

Number of pages: 743

This collection offers new approaches to theorizing Asian film in relation to the history, culture, geopolitics and economics of the continent. Bringing together original essays written by established and emerging scholars, this anthology transcends the limitations of national borders to do justice to the diverse ways in which the cinema shapes Asia geographically and imaginatively in the world today. From the revival of the Silk Road as the “belt and road” of a rising China to historical ruminations on the legacy of colonialism across the continent, the authors argue that the category of “Asian cinema” from Turkey to the edges of the Pacific continues to play a vital role in cutting-edge film research. This handbook will serve as an essential guide for committed scholars, students, and all those interested in the past, present, and possible future of Asian cinema in the 21st century.

Renegotiating Film Genres in East Asian Cinemas and Beyond

Author: Lin Feng , James Aston

Number of pages: 266

This book brings together nine original chapters to examine genre agency in East Asian cinema within the transnational context. It addresses several urgent and pertinent issues such as the distribution and exhibition practices of East Asian genre films, intra-regional creative flow of screen culture, and genre’s creative response to censorship. The volume expands the scholarly discussion of the rich heritage and fast-changing landscape of filmmaking in East Asian cinemas. Confronting the complex interaction between genres, filmic narrative and aesthetics, film history and politics, and cross-cultural translation, this book not only reevaluates genre’s role in film production, distribution, and consumption, but also tackles several under-explored areas in film studies and transnational cinema, such as the history of East Asian commercial cinema, the East Asian film industry, and cross-media and cross-market film dissemination.

Jet Li

Author: Sabrina Qiong Yu

Number of pages: 224

Jet Li is arguably the best martial arts actor alive, and his career has crossed numerous cultural and geographic boundaries, from mainland China to Hong Kong, from Hollywood to France. In Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom, Sabrina Qiong Yu uses Li as an example to address some intriguing but under-examined issues surrounding transnational stardom in general and transnational kung fu stardom in particular. Presenting case studies of audiences' responses to Jet Li films and his star image, this book explores the way in which Li has evolved from a Chinese wuxia hero to a transnational kung fu star in relation to the discourses of genre, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and national identity. By rejecting a text-centred approach which prevails in star studies and instead emphasising the role of audiences in constructing star image, this book challenges some established perspectives in the study of Chinese male screen images and martial arts/action cinema. As one of the first book-length studies on Chinese stars/ stardom and transnational stardom, Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom is essential reading for students and researchers in Film...

The Global 1960s

Author: Tamara Chaplin , Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

Number of pages: 302

The Global 1960s presents compelling narratives from around the world in order to de-center the roles played by the United States and Europe in both scholarship on, and popular memories of, the sixties. Geographically and chronologically broad, this volume scrutinizes the concept of "the sixties" as defined in both Western and non-Western contexts. It provides scope for a set of analyses that together span the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Written by a diverse and international group of contributors, chapters address topics ranging from the socialist scramble for Africa, to the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, global media coverage of Israel, Cold War politics in Hong Kong cinema, sexual revolution in France, and cultural imperialism in Latin America. The Global 1960s explores the contest between convention and counter-culture that shaped this iconic decade, emphasizing that while the sixties are well-known for liberation, activism, and protest against the establishment, traditional hierarchies and social norms remained remarkably entrenched. Multi-faceted and transnational in approach, this book is valuable reading for all students and scholars ...

The Creation of Wing Chun

Author: Benjamin N. Judkins , Jon Nielson

Number of pages: 364

Looks at southern Chinese martial arts traditions and how they have become important to local identity and narratives of resistance. This book explores the social history of southern Chinese martial arts and their contemporary importance to local identity and narratives of resistance. Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee ushered the Chinese martial arts onto an international stage in the 1970s. Lee’s teacher, Ip Man, master of Wing Chun Kung Fu, has recently emerged as a highly visible symbol of southern Chinese identity and pride. Benjamin N. Judkins and Jon Nielson examine the emergence of Wing Chun to reveal how this body of social practices developed and why individuals continue to turn to the martial arts as they navigate the challenges of a rapidly evolving environment. After surveying the development of hand combat traditions in Guangdong Province from roughly the start of the nineteenth century until 1949, the authors turn to Wing Chun, noting its development, the changing social attitudes towards this practice over time, and its ultimate emergence as a global art form.

China

Author: Gary Bettinson

Number of pages: 232

Commended for their social relevance and artistic value, Chinese films remain at the forefront of international cinema, bolstered in recent years by a new generation of talented young filmmakers. Directory of World Cinema: China presents an accessible overview of the definitive films of Hong Kong and mainland China, with particular attention to the achievements of prolific industry figures, the burgeoning independent sector, and the embrace of avant-garde practices of art cinema. Spanning a variety of characteristic genres, including horror, heroic bloodshed, romantic comedy, and kung-fu, reviews cover individual titles in considerable depth and are accompanied by a selection of full-color film stills. A comprehensive filmography and a bibliography of recommended reading complete this essential companion to Chinese cinema.

Chinese Martial Arts and Media Culture

Author: Tim Trausch

Number of pages: 238

Signs and images of the Chinese martial arts genre are increasingly included in the media of global popular culture. As tropes of martial arts are not restricted to what is constructed as one medium, one region, or one (sub)genre, neither are the essays in this collection.

Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium

Author: Ya-chen Chen

Number of pages: 295

Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, examines underexposed gender issues in more recent films, focusing on the contradictory feminism in the film narratives. Through the lens of Chinese martial arts films, Chen delves into "Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism," highlighting the glass ceiling which marks the maximal exercise of feminism which the patriarchal order is willing to accept.

The Philosophy of Ang Lee

Author: Robert Arp , Adam Barkman , James McRae

Number of pages: 312

Ang Lee (b. 1954) has emerged as one of cinema's most versatile, critically acclaimed, and popular directors. Known for his ability to transcend cultural and stylistic boundaries, Lee has built a diverse oeuvre that includes films about culture clashes and globalization (Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994, and The Wedding Banquet, 1993), a period drama (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), a martial arts epic (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), a comic book action movie (Hulk, 2003), and an American western (Brokeback Mountain, 2005). The Philosophy of Ang Lee draws from both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions to examine the director's works. The first section focuses on Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist themes in his Chinese-language films, and the second examines Western philosophies in his English-language films; but the volume ultimately explores how Lee negotiates all of these traditions, strategically selecting from each in order to creatively address key issues. With interest in this filmmaker and his work increasing around the release of his 3-D magical adventure The Life of Pi (2012), The Philosophy of Ang Lee serves as a timely investigation of the groundbreaking auteur and...

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films

Author: Sabine Haenni , Sarah Barrow , John White

Number of pages: 666

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films comprises 200 essays by leading film scholars analysing the most important, influential, innovative and interesting films of all time. Arranged alphabetically, each entry explores why each film is significant for those who study film and explores the social, historical and political contexts in which the film was produced. Ranging from Hollywood classics to international bestsellers to lesser-known representations of national cinema, this collection is deliberately broad in scope crossing decades, boundaries and genres. The encyclopedia thus provides an introduction to the historical range and scope of cinema produced throughout the world.

Experts in Action

Author: Lauren Steimer

Number of pages: 234

Action movie stars ranging from Jackie Chan to lesser-known stunt women and men like Zoë Bell and Chad Stahelski stun their audiences with virtuosic martial arts displays, physical prowess, and complex fight sequences. Their performance styles originate from action movies that emerged in the industrial environment of 1980s Hong Kong. In Experts in Action Lauren Steimer examines how Hong Kong--influenced cinema aesthetics and stunt techniques have been taken up, imitated, and reinvented in other locations and production contexts in Hollywood, New Zealand, and Thailand. Foregrounding the transnational circulation of Hong Kong--influenced films, television shows, stars, choreographers, and stunt workers, she shows how stunt workers like Chan, Bell, and others combine techniques from martial arts, dance, Peking opera, and the history of movie and television stunting practices to create embodied performances that are both spectacular and, sometimes, rendered invisible. By describing the training, skills, and labor involved in stunt work as well as the location-dependent material conditions and regulations that impact it, Steimer illuminates the expertise of the workers whose labor is...

Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape

Author: Shi-Yan Chao

Number of pages: 434

This book provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao's discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.

Hong Kong History

Author: Man-Kong Wong

The Asian Cinema Experience

Author: Stephen Teo

Number of pages: 272

This book explores the range and dynamism of contemporary Asian cinemas, covering East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia), South Asia (Bollywood), and West Asia (Iran), in order to discover what is common about them and to engender a theory or concept of "Asian Cinema". It goes beyond existing work which provides a field survey of Asian cinema, probing more deeply into the field of Asian Cinema, arguing that Asian Cinema constitutes a separate pedagogical subject, and putting forward an alternative cinematic paradigm. The book covers "styles", including the works of classical Asian Cinema masters, and specific genres such as horror films, and Bollywood and Anime, two very popular modes of Asian Cinema; "spaces", including artistic use of space and perspective in Chinese cinema, geographic and personal space in Iranian cinema, the private "erotic space" of films from South Korea and Thailand, and the persistence of the family unit in the urban spaces of Asian big cities in many Asian films; and "concepts" such as Pan-Asianism, Orientalism, Nationalism and Third Cinema. The rise of Asian nations on the world stage has...