Author: Karen Fang Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503600750 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
When Ridley Scott envisioned Blade Runner's set as "Hong Kong on a bad day," he nodded to the city's overcrowding as well as its widespread use of surveillance. But while Scott brought Hong Kong and surveillance into the global film repertoire, the city's own cinema has remained outside of the global surveillance discussion. In Arresting Cinema, Karen Fang delivers a unifying account of Hong Kong cinema that draws upon its renowned crime films and other unique genres to demonstrate Hong Kong's view of surveillance. She argues that Hong Kong's films display a tolerance of—and even opportunism towards—the soft cage of constant observation, unlike the fearful view prevalent in the West. However, many surveillance cinema studies focus solely on European and Hollywood films, discounting other artistic traditions and industrial circumstances. Hong Kong's films show a more crowded, increasingly economically stratified, and postnational world that nevertheless offers an aura of hopeful futurity. Only by exploring Hong Kong surveillance film can we begin to shape a truly global understanding of Hitchcock's "rear window ethics."
Author: Karen Fang Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317298810 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
Critical theory and popular wisdom are rife with images of surveillance as an intrusive, repressive practice often suggestively attributed to eastern powers and opposed to western liberalism. Hollywood-dominated global media has long promulgated a geopoliticized east-west axis of freedom vs. control. This book focuses on Asian and Asia-based films and cinematic traditions obscured by lopsided western hegemonic discourse and—more specifically—probes these films’ treatments of a phenomenon that western film often portrays with neo-orientalist hysteria. Exploring recent and historical movies made in post-social and anti-Communist societies such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, the book picks up on the political and economic concerns implicitly underlying Sinophobic and anti-Communist Asian images in Hollywood films while also considering how these societies and states depict the issues of centralization, militarization and technological innovation so often figured as distinctive of the difference between eastern despotism and western liberalism.
Author: Bruce Isaacs Publisher: ISBN: 0190889950 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
In a now-famous interview with Fran�ois Truffaut in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock described his masterpiece Rear Window (1954) as "the purest expression of a cinematic idea." But what, precisely, did Hitchcock mean by pure cinema? Was pure cinema a function of mise en sc�ne, or composition within the frame? Was it a function of montage, "of pieces of film assembled"? This notion of pure cinema has intrigued and perplexed critics, theorists, and filmmakers alike in the decades following this discussion. And even across his 40-year career, Hitchcock's own ideas about pure cinema remained mired in a lack of detail, clarity, and analytical precision. The Art of Pure Cinema is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs explores the potential of a philosophical and artistic approach most explicitly demonstrated by Hitchcock in his later films, beginning with Hitchcock's contact with the European avant-garde film movement in the mid-1920s. Tracing the evolution of a philosophy of pure cinema across Hitchcock's most experimental works - Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, and Frenzy - Isaacs rereads these works in a new and vital context. In addition to this historical account, the book presents the first examination of pure cinema as an integrated stylistics of mise en sc�ne, montage, and sound design. The films of so-called Hitchcockian imitators like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma are also examined in light of a provocative claim: that the art of pure cinema is only fully realized after Hitchcock.
Author: Lieve Spaas Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 9780719058615 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Covering the rich film production of Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together films that might otherwise be divided by questions of race, gender, genre, period, or nation, in a valuable comparative study of a diverse corpus. Individual countries, film-makers, and films are treated separately in order to emphasize their specific identities or those which are represented in their films, and key films are examined within a well-developed historical context. Clearly written and accessible to the specialist and general reader alike, this informative book is a valuable reference source.
Author: Garrett Stewart Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226774114 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
What is the mysterious region between photography and the phenomenon of narrative cinema, between the photogram - a single film frame - and the illusion of motion we recognise as movies?.
Author: Eligah Boykin Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1984558854 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 399
Book Description
The author wishes to offer you more than the standard fare of sex and violence that normally comes with your popcorn, burgers, and fries. He is betting you have been hankering for a little courage and love, spiced with pride and faithfulness, and that you might find a turn to nobility and truth more to your tastes. This book of movie reviews samples the classics and more contemporary selections. You will discover the author’s observations and thoughts about Twelve Years a Slave as well as Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman. We will examine Edison with Spencer Tracy and David Mamet’s Oleanna. James Coburn will take us dancing and prancing through death and danger as Our Man Flint, and we will have a front-row seat to Klaatu’s stern lecture to humanity in The Day the Earth Stood Still. After a round trip through The Forbidden Kingdom with Jackie Chan and Jett Li, we will, at length, settle down to a glass of milk and a slice of apple pie with Young Tom Edison. Finally, with all this under our belt, we might, at last, find ourselves meditating and contemplating upon a route toward a new cinema.
Author: Luke White Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824882989 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
In 1978 the films Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, both starring a young Jackie Chan, caused a stir in the Hong Kong cinema industry and changed the landscape of martial arts cinema. Mixing virtuoso displays of acrobatic kung fu with knockabout humor to huge box office success, they broke the mold of the tragic and heroic martial arts film and sparked not only a wave of imitations, but also a much longer trend for kung fu comedies that continues to the present day. Legacies of the Drunken Master—the first book-length analysis of kung fu comedy—interrogates the politics of the films and their representations of the performing body. It draws on an interdisciplinary engagement with popular culture and an interrogation of the critical literature on Hong Kong and martial arts cinema to offer original readings of key films. These readings pursue the genre in terms of its carnival aesthetic, the utopias of the body it envisions, its highly stylized depictions of violence, its images of masculinity, and the registers of its “hysterical” laughter. The book’s analyses are carried out amidst kung fu comedy’s shifting historical contexts, including the aftermath of the 1960s radical youth movements, the rapidly globalizing colonial enclave of Hong Kong and the emerging consciousness of its 1997 handover to China, and the transnationalization of cinema audiences. It argues that through kung fu comedy’s images of the body, the genre articulated in complex and often contradictory ways political realities relevant to late twentieth-century Hong Kong and the wider conditions of globalized capitalism. The kung fu comedy entwines us in a popular cultural history that stretches into the folk past and forward into utopian and dystopian possibilities. Theoretically rich and critical, Legacies of the Drunken Master aims to be at the forefront of scholarship on martial arts cinema. It also addresses readers with a broader interest in Hong Kong culture and politics during the 1970s and 1980s, postcolonialism in East Asia, and action and comedy films in a global context—as well as those fascinated with the performing body in the martial arts.
Author: Paul Monaco Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0810874393 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
In A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft and Business of Cinema, Paul Monaco provides a survey of the narrative feature film from the 1920s to the present. The book focuses on 170 of the most highly regarded and recognized feature films selected by the Hollywood establishment: each Oscar winner for Best Picture, as well as those voted the greatest by members of the American Film Institute. By focusing on a select group of films that represent the epitome of these collaborations, Monaco provides an essential history of one of the modern world's most complex and successful cultural institutions: Hollywood. Divided into three sections, "Classic Hollywood, 1927-1948," "Hollywood In Transition, 1949-1974," and "The New Hollywood, 1975 To The Present," Monaco examines some of the most memorable works in cinematic history, including The General, Wings, Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, On the Waterfront, The Searchers, Psycho, West Side Story, The Godfat
Author: Karen Fang Publisher: Hong Kong University Press ISBN: 9622096522 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 157
Book Description
A Better Tomorrow has always been hailed as a milestone in Hong Kong cinema. This book describes the different responses to the movie in Hong Kong and later in its reception worldwide, which paved the way for the promotion of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat to their current prominence in Hollywood. Fang examines the different notions of the genre of action cinema in Asian and Western film industries. She tracks the connections between ying shung pian, or "hero" movie, the term by which Woo's film became famous in Hong Kong, and the spectacle of violence emphasized in the term "heroic bloodshed," the category in which the film was known in the West. Finally, she concludes with a discussion of the status of the film and its huge success in the current globalized industry.
Author: Karen Fang
Author: Karen Fang
Author: Bruce Isaacs
Author: Lieve Spaas
Author: Garrett Stewart
Author: Eligah Boykin
Author: Luke White
Author: 
Author: Paul Monaco
Author: Karen Fang