Taiwan
Berry, Chris. “Betelnut Beauty.” Cinemaya (Autumn 2001): 29-30.
—–. “Haunted Realisms: Postcoloniality and the Cinema of Chang Tso-chi.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 33-50.
—–. “Re-writing Cinema: Markets, Languages, Cultures in Taiwan.” In Shih, Fang-long, Stuart Thompson, and Paul-Francois Tremlett, eds., Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan. London and NY: Routledge, 2009, 140-153.
—–. “Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples and Cinema: From Mascot to Fourth Cinema?” In Bi-yu Chang and Pei-yin Lin, eds., Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming. NY: Routledge, 2019, 228-241.
—–. “An Alternative Cinema of Poverty: Understanding the Taiwanese-language Film Industry.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 140-49.
Berry, Chris and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.
Berry, Chris and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley. “Introduction to a Special Issue on Taiwanese-language Films (taiyupian).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 72-75.
Bloom, Michelle. “The Absent Father of Sino-French Cinema: Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema and 1950s French Auteurs.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 1 (2014): 37-56.
[Abstract: In contemporary Sino-French cinema, father characters who are dead, long lost or geographically distant leave gaping holes in the lives of the offspring left behind. The absent fathers in Sino-French films by Taiwanese auteurs Cheng Yu-chieh, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang serve as metaphors for French auteurs. French New Wave films constitute the majority of the intertexts; however, early 1950s French cinema and even late nineteenth-century painting reflect the expansiveness of French influence. Despite the possibility of an orientalist dynamic, Taiwanese auteurs not only pay homage to their French ‘fathers’, and especially New Waver François Truffaut, but also strike out on their own, contributing innovative work to contemporary transnational cinemas.]
Braester, Yomi. “Shards of Memory: Papa Can you Hear Me Sing? and the Demolished Spaces of Taiwan Urban Cinema.” Conference Paper, Remapping Taiwan (UCLA, Oct. 13-15, 2000).
—–. “The Dream of Flying: Taipei and Beijing Cinematic Poetics of Demolition.” Tamkang Review (Summer 2000).
—–. “If We Could Remember Everything, We Would Be Able to Fly: Taipei’s Cinematic Poetics of Demolition.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Spring 2003): 29-62.
—–. “Tales of a Porous City: Public Residences and Private Streets in Taipei Films.” In Charles Laughlin, ed., Contested Modernity in Chinese Literature. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 157-70.
—–. “The Impossible Task of Taipei Films.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 51-59.
Braester, Yomi and Nicole Huang, geust editors. Special issue on Taiwan cinema of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Sping 2003).
Chang, Chia-ju. “Putting Back the Animals: Woman-Animal Meme in Contemporary Taiwanese Ecofeminist Imagination.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, 255-70.
Chang, Hsiao-hung. “The Unbearable Lightness of Globalization: On the Transnational Flight of Wuxia Films.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 95-107.
Chang, Hsiao-hung and Chih-hung Wang. “Mapping Taipei’s Landscape of Desire: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the Family Park.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 115-25.
Chang, Ivy I-chu. Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
[Abstract: This book investigates the aesthetics and politics of Post/Taiwan-New-Cinema by examining fifteen movies by six directors and frequent award winners in international film festivals. The book considers the works of such prominent directors as Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang and Chang Tsuo-chi and their influence on Asian films, as well as emergent phenomenal directors such as Wei Te-sheng, Zero Chou, and Chung Mong-hong. It also explores the possibility of transnational and trans-local social sphere in the interstices of layered colonial legacies, nation-state domination, and global capitalism. Considering Taiwan cinema in the wake of globalization, it analyses how these films represent the socio-political transition among multiple colonial legacies, global capitalism, and the changing cross-strait relation between Taiwan and the Mainland China. The book discusses how these films represent nomadic urban middle class, displaced transnational migrant workers, roaming children and young gangsters, and explores how the continuity/disjuncture of globalization has not only carved into historical and personal memories and individual bodies, but also influenced the transnational production modes and marketing strategies of cinema.]
Chang, Jinn-Pei. “The Mind Space of Taipei’s Adolescents.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 101-103.
Chen Feibao 陈飞宝 , ed. Taiwan dianying shihua 台湾电影史话 (A history of Taiwan cinema). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1988.
Chen, Kuan-hsing. “Taiwanese New Cinema.” In John Hill and Pamela Gibson, eds. World Cinema: Critical Approaches. NY: Oxford UP, 2000, 173-77.
—–. “A Borrowed Life in Banana Paradise: De-Cold War/Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 39-54.
Chen, Ru-shou Robert. “Focus on Taipei: An Introduction.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 17-19.
Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 138-43. [articles in both Chinese and English]
Cheng, Pei-kai. “From Shanghai to Taipei: Metropolis in Spatial, Cultural, and Existential Consciousness in Chinese Cinema, 1930-1990.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei 尋找電影中的台北 (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 138-43.
Chen, Ya-chen. The Taiwanese Cinematization of Feminine Writing. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.
[Abstract: A number of Taiwanese scholars gate-kept, filtered, selected, and strategized to transfer Luce Irigaray’s, Hélène Cixous’s, and Julia Kristeva’s French feminist theories into their own national context by exerting their cross-lingual and cross-cultural academic power in the 1990s. They also reshaped, localized, acculturated, marketed, and Taiwanized these French feminist theories, which was essential for Taiwanese academia. According to French feminist literary theories, écriture féminine (“feminine writing”) refers to women’s own written self-expression used to escape from the patriarchal language system. Beginning with a description of the acculturation of French feminist literary theories, this book highlights how women’s own spoken voices or autobiographical written expressions appear in Taiwanese cinematic works when the camera is compared to the cinematic pen. It analytically digest the écriture féminine of parler-femme in the Taiwanese films The Butcher’s Wife, Taste of Life, Sex Appeal, and Ghosted.]
Chiao, Hsiung-ping 焦雄屏, ed. Taiwan xin dianying 台灣新電影 (New Taiwan cinema). Taibei: Shibao, 1988.
—–. “The Emergence of the New Cinema of Taiwan.” Asian Cinema 5, 1 (1990): 9-11.
—–. “The Distinct Taiwanese and Hong Kong Cinemas.” In Chris Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1991, 155-65.
—–. “Second Wave from Taiwan: Three Interviews.” Cinemaya 34 (1996): 4-13.
Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Taiwan and Its Spectacular Others: Aesthetic Reflexivity in Two Documentaries by Women Filmmakers from Taiwan.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 98-107.
—–. “The Vision of Taiwanese New Democracy.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 17-32.
—–. “The Subaltern Woman’s Voice and the (Film)making of Modern Taiwan.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong: HK: The Chinese University Press, 2009, 165-183.
—–. “The Question of Translation in Taiwanese Colonial Cinematic Space.” Journal of Asian Studies 70, 1 (2011): 77-97.
[Abstract: This essay studies the practice of cultural translation in colonial Taiwanese cinematic space. Just as the Japanese translation of Western cinema brings into play traces of Japanese otherness, the Taiwanese translation of the Japanese translation disrupts the Japanese monopoly on the meaning of cinematic experience in colonial Taiwan. A key figure in this complex cultural translation was the benshi, a translator who performed alongside the screen to interpret the film for the audience. This study argues that an overemphasis on the interventional power of the benshi’s word does not do justice to the complex role of the benshi as a translator. In spite of its inscription of the cultural specific in the cinematic space, the presence of the benshi is also a reminder of an unfulfilled desire: the desire for the (foreign) image and the desire for the other. Insofar as the act of translation is a critical engagement with the challenges posed by the other, a simplistic celebration of local resistance does not help us fully address the complexity of cultural translation that defines the mediascape of the modern age.]
Chiu, Kuei-fen, Ming-yeh Rawnsley, and Gary Rawnsley, eds. Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change. NY: Routledge, 2017.
[Abstract: The book examines recent developments in Taiwan cinema, with particular focus on a leading contemporary Taiwan filmmaker, Wei Te-sheng, who is responsible for such Asian blockbusters as Cape No.7, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale and Kano. The book discusses key issues, including: why (until about 2008) Taiwan cinema underwent a decline, and how cinema is portraying current social changes in Taiwan, including changing youth culture and how it represents indigenous people in the historical narrative of Taiwan. The book also explores the reasons why current Taiwan cinema is receiving a much less enthusiastic response globally compared to its reception in previous decades.]
Chong, Woei Lien, “Taiwan Cinema at the 1997 International Rotterdam Film Festival: Comedy and Small-Scale Family Drama.” China Information 11, 4 (Spring 1997): 105-116.
“Cinema.” The Republic of China Yearbook–Taiwan, 2001.
Davis, Darrell William. “Trendy in Taiwan: Problems of Popularity in the Island’s Cinema.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds.,Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 146-57.
—–. “Second Coming: The Legacy of Taiwan New Cinema.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 133-50.
Davis, Darrel William and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007.
Deslandes, Jeanne (with Penny Lin, Kelly Chu-Chun Fan, and Lucia Tai-Yun Cheng). “Dancing Shadows of Film Exhibitions: Taiwan and the Japanese Influence.” Screening the Past (Nov. 2000).
Duan, Chen-Su. “A Sociological Study of Taipei Through Films, 1960-1990.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 72-77.
Eberhard, Wolfram. The Chinese Silver Screen: Hong Kong and Taiwanese Motion Pictures in the 1960s. Taibei: Orient Culture Service, 1972.
Green, Frederik H. “All Under Heaven KANO: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Making of a New Taiwanese Identity in Wei Desheng’s Taiwan-Japan Trilogy.” Journal of East-Asian Popular Culture 3, 2 (Fall 2017): 169-182.
Ho, Aaron K. H. “The Lack of Chinese Lesbians: Double Crossing in Blue Gate Crossing.” Genders 49 (2009).
Hong, Guo-Juin. “Historiography of Absence: Taiwan Cinema before New Cinema 1982.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 4, 1 (2010) : 5-14.
[Abstract: The introduction traces the history of Taiwan cinema before the New Cinema of the 1980s. By sketching the much under-studied periods of Taiwan under Japanese occupation and after restoration in 1945, I provide the context within which this special issue on Taiwan’s missing years may be understood. While the featured articles focus mostly on the Mandarin-language Healthy Realism of the 1960s and 1970s, I describe in some detail its Taiwanese-dialect counterpart to highlight the questions of nation at the core of Taiwan’s pursuit of modernization. My goals are to bring to light the absent history of Taiwan cinema during the missing years, to the study of which this special issue collectively contributes.]
—–. Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
[Abstract: A groundbreaking study of Taiwan cinema, this is the first English language book that covers its entire history. Hong revises how Taiwan cinema is taught and studied by taking into account not only the auteurs of New Taiwan Cinema, but also the history of popular genre films before the 1980s. This work will be essential reading for students and scholars of Taiwan and Chinese-language cinemas and of great value to those interested in the larger context of East Asian cultural history as well as film and visual studies in general.]
—–. “Healthy Realism in Taiwan, 1964-80: Film Style, Cultural Policies and Mandarin Cinema.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 95-102.
—–. “Voices and Their Discursive Dis/Content in Taiwan Documentary.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 2 (2013): 183-193.
[Abstract: Instead of attempting to provide a survey of Taiwan documentary, this article focuses on a few critical moments in its long and uneven history and proposes a potentially productive site for understanding its formal manifestations of representational politics. By honing in on the uses of sounds and words, I show that the principle of a unitary voice–voice understood both as the utterances of sound and the politico-cultural meaning of such utterances–organizes the earlier periods of the colonial and authoritarian rules and shapes later iterations of and formal reactions to them. Be it voice-over narration or captions and inter-titles, this article provides a historiographical lens through which the politics of representation in Taiwan documentary may be rethought. Furthermore, this article takes documentary not merely as a genre of non-fiction filmmaking. Rather, it insists on documentary as a mode, and indeed modes, of representation that do not belong exclusively to the non-fiction. Notions of “documentability” are considered together with the corollary tendency to “fictionalize” in cinema, fiction and non-fiction. Taiwan, with its complex histories in general and the specific context within which the polyglossiac practices of New Taiwan Documentary have blossomed in recent decades in particular, is a productive site to investigate the questions of “sound” in cinematic form and “voice” in representational politics.]
Horng, Menghsin C. “Domestic Dislocations: Healthy Realism, Stardom, and the Cinematic Projection of Home in Postwar Taiwan.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 4, 1 (March 2010): 27-44.
[Abstract: Healthy Realism was created under the auspices of the Nationalist Party (KMT) to project the party’s domestic legitimacy and establish the place of Mandarin-language cinema in the international market. I ascribe the success of Healthy Realism less to its privileged origins within the state-run studio or propagandistic authority, but more to the semiotic work of its stars as key vectors in the transmission of film ideology. As long as the on- and off-screen images of its stars cohered, the genre could maintain its claims to realism. I examine Beautiful Duckling (1965), Lonely Seventeen (1967), and Execution in Autumn (1972), tracking changes to the trope of home as expressed primarily through the star image of Tang Pao-yun. Changes to the genre and Tang’s image responded to geopolitical shifts, eventually exceeding both the formal and narrative constraints of Healthy Realism and exposing the ideological dissolution of ‘home’ under the preexisting authoritarian figurations.]
Hu, Brian. “Formula 17: Testing a Formula for Mainstream Cinema in Taiwan.” Senses of Cinema 34 (Jan.-Mar. 2005)
Huang Ren. Beiqing Taiyu pian (The tragedy of Taiwanese language film). Taibei: Wanxiang tushu, 1994. [history of Taiwanese language film]
Huang, Teresa. “The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s Taiwanese-language Cinema Restoration Project.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 150-55..
Huang, Yu-shan and Chun-chi Wang. “Post-Taiwan New Cinema Women Directors and Their Films: Auteurs, Images, Language.” Trs. Robin Visser and Thomas Moran. In Lingzhen Wang, ed., Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. NY: Columbia UP, 2011, 132-53.
Hyland, Robert. “Global Politics and a Cinema of Localism: Contemporary Taiwanese Film.” IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies 1, 1 (2014).
[Abstract: In the opening sequence of Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7 (Hai Jiao Qi Hao) (2008), the lead character Aga smashes a guitar against a lamppost while shouting ‘Fuck you Taipei.’ He then leaves the city on his motorbike and turning his back on the metropolis, heads down Highway Number One toward the southern county of Pingtung. This is a brief moment of populist politics in the film, and Aga’s rejection of a ‘false’ Taipei identity in favour of a more ‘true’ local identity relates to contemporary Taiwan’s contested political identity. The People’s Republic of China, which officially considers Taiwan a province of the mainland, insists that the world deny Taiwan independent nation status in international venues, considering Taiwan as encompassed by China under a ‘One China, Two Systems’ policy. In Cape No. 7, Aga’s cry becomes a means of denying that reductive imago of Taipei as province of China/Taipei as representative of all Taiwan. By translocating its story to Pingtung’s ethnically diverse and linguistically polyglot local communities, the film articulates a comprehensive and encompassing conception of Taiwan that is posed in opposition to Mandarin speaking ‘Chinese Taipei’. The film promotes a Taiwanese identity that consists of a diversity of political and cultural forms: Han Chinese as well as Hokklo, Hakka, aboriginal and immigrant. This paper explores the search for ‘the local’ in contemporary Taiwanese populist cinema.]
Kellner, Douglas. “New Taiwan Cinema in the 1980s.” Jump Cut 42 (1998): 101-15.
Kowallis, Jon. “The Diaspora in Postmodern Taiwan and Hong Kong Film: Framing Stan Lai’s The Peach Blossom Land with Allen Fong’s Ah Ying.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.
Kramer, Stefan. “Transcultural Narrations of the Local: Taiwanese Cinema Between Utopia and Heterotopia.” In Natascah Gentz and Stefan Kramer, eds.,Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006, 45-58.
Lee, Daw-Mng. “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 68-82.
Lee, Ching-Chih. “The Construct and Transformation of Taipei’s City Image.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 27-33.
Lee, Tai-Dow. “Rereading the Cultural Significance of Taiwan’s Cinema of the 1990s.” Asian Cinema 7, 1 (1995): 3-11.
Li Yongwei 李詠薇. “Taiwan ‘Xindianying’ shiqi wei gongzuozhe fangwenlu” 台灣新電影十七位工作者訪問錄 (An interview with seventeen filmmakers in the Taiwanese new cinema movement). Dianying xinshang 5, 2 (1987): 5-16.
Li, Youxin 李幼新, ed. Gangtai liu da daoyan 港台六大導演 (Six great directors in Hong Kong and Taiwan). Taiwan: Zili wanbao, 1986.
Liang, Pi-ju. “From Provincial to International: Competing Imaginings and Representations of Taiyupian in News Reports between 1956 and 1958.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 88-100.
Liao, Chao-yan. “Borrowed Modernity: History and the Subject in A Borrowed Life.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 275-93.
Liao, Gene-Fon. “The Vanished Feature: A Comparison in Cinematic Practice between Taiwanese and Mandarin Films in the 1960s.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 51-55.
—–. “Taiyupian: A Kaleidoscope of Film Production Flashes Back.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 69-71.
Liao, Ping-hui. “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28 Incident as Spectacle.” Public Culture 5 (1993): 281-296.
Lim, Song Hwee. “Celluloid Comrades: Male Homosexuality in Chinese Cinema in the 1990s.” China Information 16, 4 (2002): 68-88.
—–. “Taiwan New Cinema: Small Nation with Soft Power.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 152-69.
—–. Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power: Authorship, Transnationality, Historiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: Why has Taiwanese film been so appealing to film directors, critics, and audiences across the world? This book argues that because Taiwan is a nation without hard political and economic power, cinema becomes a form of soft power tool that Taiwan uses to attract global attention, to gain support, and to build allies. Author Song Hwee Lim shows how this goal has been achieved by Taiwanese directors whose films win the hearts and minds of foreign audiences to make Taiwan a major force in world cinema. The book maps Taiwan’s cinematic output in the twenty-first century through the three keywords in the book’s subtitle-authorship, transnationality, historiography. Its object of analysis is the legacy of Taiwan New Cinema, a movement that begun in the early 1980s that has had a lasting impact upon filmmakers and cinephiles worldwide for nearly forty years. By examining case studies that include Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang, this book suggests that authorship is central to Taiwan cinema’s ability to transcend borders to the extent that the historiographical writing of Taiwan cinema has to be reimagined. It also looks at the scaling down of soft power from the global to the regional via a cultural imaginary called “little freshness”, which describes films and cultural products from Taiwan that have become hugely popular in China and Hong Kong. In presenting Taiwan cinema’s significance as a case of a small nation with enormous soft power, this book hopes to recast the terms and stakes of both cinema studies and soft power studies in academia.]
Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film. NY: Columbia UP, 2007.
[Abstract: In 1945, Taiwan was placed under the administrative control of the Republic of China, and after two years, accusations of corruption and a failing economy sparked a local protest that was brutally quashed by the Kuomintang government. The February Twenty-Eighth (or 2/28) Incident led to four decades of martial law that became known as the White Terror. During this period, talk of 2/28 was forbidden and all dissent violently suppressed, but since the lifting of martial law in 1987, this long-buried history has been revisited through commemoration and narrative, cinema and remembrance. Drawing on a wealth of secondary theoretical material as well as her own original research, Sylvia Li-chun Lin conducts a close analysis of the political, narrative, and ideological structures involved in the fictional and cinematic representations of the 2/28 Incident and White Terror. She assesses the role of individual and collective memory and institutionalized forgetting, while underscoring the dangers of re-creating a historical past and the risks of trivialization. She also compares her findings with scholarly works on the Holocaust and the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Japan, questioning the politics of forming public and personal memories and the political teleology of “closure.” This is the first book to be published in English on the 2/28 Incident and White Terror and offers a valuable matrix of comparison for studying the portrayal of atrocity in a specific locale.]
—–. “Between Past and Future: Documentary Films on the 2/28 Incident in Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009): 46-71.
Lin, Sylvia Li-chun and Tze-Lan Deborah Sang, eds. Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. NY: Routledge, 2012.
[Abstract: To date, there is but a handful of articles on documentary films from Taiwan. This volume seeks to remedy the paucity in this area of research and conduct a systematic analysis of the genre. Each contributor to the volume investigates the various aspects of documentary by focusing on one or two specific films that document social, political and cultural changes in recent Taiwanese history. Since the lifting of martial law, documentary has witnessed a revival in Taiwan, with increasing numbers of young, independent filmmakers covering a wide range of subject matter, in contrast to fiction films, which have been in steady decline in their appeal to local, Taiwanese viewers. These documentaries capture images of Taiwan in its transformation from an agricultural island to a capitalist economy in the global market, as well as from an authoritarian system to democracy. What make these documentaries a unique subject of academic inquiry lies not only in their exploration of local Taiwanese issues but, more importantly, in the contribution they make to the field of non-fiction film studies. As the former third-world countries and Soviet bloc begin to re-examine their past and document social changes on film, the case of Taiwan will undoubtedly become a valuable source of comparison and inspiration. These Taiwanese documentaries introduce a new, Asian perspective to the wealth of Anglo-American scholarship with the potential to serve as exemplar for countries undergoing similar political and social transformations.]
Lin, Wenchi. “The Representation of Taipei in Taiwan Films.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 86-89.
—–. “Taipei at the Turn of the Century in Taiwan Cinema.” In Corrado Neri and Kirstie Gormley. eds., Taiwan Cinema/Le cinéma taiwanais. Lyon: Asiexpo Edition, 2009.
—–. “More than Escapist Romantic Fantasies: Revisiting Qiong Yao Films in the 1970s.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 4, 1 (March 2010): 45-50.
[Abstract: Qiong Yao films of the 1970s are thought to provide nothing but escapist romantic fantasies. This misconception prevents scholars from perceiving a strong link to the social reality of the 1970s in some of Qiong Yao’s popular films. By examining the positive images of working girls in two Qiong Yao films Lee Hsing directed in 1973, The Young Ones and The Heart with a Million Knots and Bai Jingrui’s 1976The Autumn Love Song, this essay argues that Qiong Yao films provide ‘realistic’ dreams of social mobility, making the romantic love even more appealing to the working-class females, the main body of Qiong Yao’s audience.]
—–. “Of Femal Spies and National Heroes: A Brief History of Anti-Japanese Films in Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1970s.” In Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada, eds., Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016, 40-61.
Lo, Dennis. “Emergent National Discourses: Mythmaking and the National Story in Taiwanese Roadtrip Films.” Asian Cinema 21, 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 86-112.
Lo, Dennis. The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020.
[Abstract: the first monograph dedicated to the study of the politics, history, aesthetics, and practices of location shooting for Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and coproduced art cinemas shot in rural communities since the late 1970s Dennis Lo argues that rural location shooting, beyond serving aesthetic and technical needs, constitutes practices of cultural survival in a region beset with disruptive and disorienting social changes, including rapid urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises In response to these social changes, auteurs like Hou Xiaoxian, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, and Li Xing engaged in location shooting to transform sites of film production into symbolically meaningful places of collective memories and aspirations ese production practices ultimately enabled auteurs to experiment with imagining Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and cross-strait communities in novel and contentious ways.]
Lu Feiyi 盧非易. Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue (1994-1994) 台灣電影政治經濟美學 (Taiwanese cinema: politics, economics, and aesthetics). Taipei: Yuanliu 1998.
—– [Lu, Feii]. “Another Cinema: Darkness and Light.” In Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds., Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 137-48.
Lu, Sheldon H. China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. [examines film, television, avant-garde art, literature, critical theory, and intellectual history]
Lu, Tonglin. Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
—–. “Taiwan New Cinema and Its Legacy.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 122-30.
Lü Xushang 呂訴上. Taiwan dianying xiju shi 台灣電影戲劇史 (History of Taiwan cinema and drama). Taipei: Dongfang, 1961.
Ma, Sheng-mei. The Last Isle: Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan. Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2015.
[Abstract: Taiwan is in danger of becoming the last isle, losing its sovereignty and identity. The Last Isle opens from where Taiwan film scholarship leaves off—the 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, focusing on relatively unknown contemporary films that are “unglobalizable,” such as Cape No. 7, Island Etude, Din Tao, and Seven Days in Heaven. It explores Taiwan films’ inextricability with trauma theory, the irony of loving and mourning Taiwan, multilingualism, local beliefs, and theatrical practices, including Ang Lee’s “white” films. The second half of the book analyzes Taiwan’s popular culture in Western-style food and drink, conditions over living and dying, and English education, concluding with the source of Taiwan’s anxiety—China. This book distinguishes itself from Taiwan scholarship in its stylistic crazy quilt of the scholarly interwoven with the personal, evidenced right from the outset in the poetic title “The Last Isle,” coupled with the “dissertating” subtitle. This approach intertwines the helix of reason and affect, scholarship and emotion. The Last Isle accomplishes a look at globalization from the bottom up, from a global Taiwan whose very existence is in doubt.]
Marchetti, Gina. “Video Frames, Cinemascapes, and Cyberspace: Exploring Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill.” positions 9, 2 (Fall 2001): 401-22. [Project Muse link]
Martin, Fran. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representations in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. HK: University of Hong Kong Press, 2003.
—–. “Taiwan (Trans)national Cinema: The Far-flung Adventures of a Taiwanese Tomboy.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds.,Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 95-107. [focuses on Yee Chih-yen’s Blue Gate Crossing, 2002]
Mon, Ya-feng. Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan: Cinema as a Sensory Circuit. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
[Abstract: This book uses the potent case study of contemporary Taiwanese queer romance films to address the question of how capitalism in Taiwan has privileged the film industry at the expense of the audience’s freedom to choose and respond to culture on its own terms. Interweaving in-depth interviews with filmmakers, producers, marketers, and spectators, Ya-Fong Mon takes a biopolitical approach to the question, showing how the industry uses investments in techno-science, ancillary marketing, and media convergence to seduce and control the sensory experience of the audience-yet that control only extends so far: volatility remains a key component of the film-going experience.]
New Films from Taiwan. Washington, D.C.: American Film Institute, 1988.
Ng, Kenny K. K. “Screening without China: Transregional Cinematic Smuggling between Cold War Taiwan and Colonial Hong Kong.” The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 1 (2020).
[Abstract: How can research into film policy inform us about the nature of power and cultural politics regarding film censorship? How does censorship affect the aesthetics and identity of film-making produced under political and market constraints? Focusing on the geopolitical regions of British Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, this article delineates the impact of British colonial film censorship and the politics of cinematically representing revolutionary China during the Cold War. It reveals that British Hong Kong censors changed their strategy in the 1970s and 80s from suppressing mainland Chinese films to inhibiting films that might offend China from screening in Hong Kong. The evidence points to a distinctive picture of transregional smuggling and cinematic boundary-crossing, namely, the dangerous trafficking and interception of movie images, ideologies, and propaganda. Film screening of ‘China’ in Hong Kong and Taiwan was subject to strict official surveillance to quarantine undesirable public visuality and political discourses. The study examines film’s ambiguous expressions of China and Chineseness as it constantly negotiated the factors of colonialism, Chinese nationalism, and Cold War transnational politics.]
Nornes, Mark Abe and Yueh-yu Yeh. “Taiwanese Cinema.” A City of Sadness webproject.
Ou, Alice, ed. Taiwan Films. Taipei: Variety Publishing, 1993. (contains six booklets on Wang Tong, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Taiwan film and literature, the second wave, and film and social change).
Park, Seung Hyun. “New Taiwanese Cinema and Its Historical Meanings.” Asian Cinema 14, 2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 123-44.
Pecic, Zoran Lee. New Queer Sinophone Cinema: Local Histories, Transnational Connections. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. [chapters on Zhang Yuan, Yan Yan Mak, and Zero Chou]
Pickowicz, Paul and Yingjing Zhang, eds. Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020.
[Abstract: There has been much discussion of New Wave Taiwan cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, including research that studies the pathbreaking contributions of acclaimed directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien. This book updates the scholarship on Taiwan cinema by taking it into the twenty-first century. It is the first book to take a multidisciplinary approach to evaluating recent Taiwan films. The authors are specialists in cultural studies, history, and the social sciences, and they use different film materials and methodologies to analyze the ways in which filmmakers deal with the evolution of Taiwan’s society, economy, and culture in the new century. The emphasis is placed on the diversity of approaches that characterize recent Taiwan cinema. Taiwanese filmmakers use many forms and genres to tackle pressing issues. In sharp contrast to the late-twentieth-century New Wave filmmakers who were widely regarded as producing “art films” that had little impact on the domestic market, many recent Taiwan films have enjoyed huge commercial success in Taiwan. This book probes many crucial controversies: What are Taiwan’s meaningful cultural and historical connections to Japan? How do Taiwanese filmmakers and audiences feel about mainland China? How does Taiwan cinema deal with environmental issues, animal rights, human trafficking, sexuality, and the challenges facing ethnic minorities?]
Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh T. “Taiwanese-Language Cinema: State versus Market, National versus Transnational.” Archiv Orientalni 81, 3 (2013): 437-58.
—–. “Politics of the Everday: Taiwanese-language Cinema of the 1950s-1960s.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 127-39.
Riep, Steven. “Piecing Together the Past: The Notion of Recovery in Fiction and Film from Taiwan.” Modern China 38, 2 (March 2012): 199-232.
[Abstract: Writers and filmmakers in Taiwan have sought to use the narrative techniques of classic detective fiction to recover events of the Nationalist government-imposed White Terror of the early 1950s to bring the once-concealed past to light. Fiction writer Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) pioneered this technique in short fiction written in 1983 to bring before the public the events of the White Terror and to consider how guilt for the atrocities should be affixed. Wan Jen’s (Wan Ren) 1995 feature film Super Citizen Ko explores possibilities for memorialization and the notion of victimhood in its recovery of the Nationalist repression of progressive political movements and its impact on a former political prisoner and his family. Finally, Tseng Wen-Chen (Zeng Wenzhen) in her documentary Spring: The Story of Xu Jinyu offers a portrait of a woman White Terror survivor turned political activist living in an era when the White Terror has been commemorated but remains poorly understood by the younger generation.]
Rojas, Carlos. “Touching Father: Sight, Sound, Touch, and Intermedial Intimacies.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 231-49.
[Abstract: provides a study of the intertwining of touch, vision, and intimacy in contemporary art and films. In his discussions of mediated physical contact and conflicted relationships between different pairs of male protagonists, Rojas delves into “a dialectics of proximity and distance, intimacy and alienation.” Relying upon reciprocity and connectivity, tactile contact between individuals, perceived as being potentially more direct, intimate, and sensuous, is subject to more restrictions than other modes of sensory perception. Determined by a complex set of personal, cultural, social, religious, and institutional factors, physical contact thus acquires a range of significance entwining with different circumstances. In contemporary artist Song Dong’s work “Touching my father” (1997), Song projects his own hand image onto his father’s face and body to “caress” him in the process of the father’s unclothing. The work, overcoming his estranged relationship with his father and ethical and physical barriers, opens the possibilities for trans-generational affective connections. Through detailed examination of unexpected moments of physical intimacy (between lovers, acquaintances, or strangers) in the films of Wong Kar-wai 王家衛, Zhang Yuan 張元, and Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮, Rojas unfolds the delicate, nuanced dialectics of desire and alienation. In Happy Together (1997), East Palace West Palace (1996), and The River (1997), the male protagonist’s relationship with his male lover or even a stranger functions as a displaced substitution for his estranged relationship with his actual father. As Rojas’s sensitive readings of these films show, it is “precisely intimate tactile contact (typically prohibited in a familial relationship, yet compulsory in a sexual one) that functions as a fulcrum across which this process of displacement operates.” The critical exploration of sensuous tactility, intimacy, and alienation in a nexus of male romantic, erotic, and ethical relationships boils down to one deeply touching image, both literally and metaphorically: the touching hand.]
Sato, Tadao. “A Passage to Taiwan.” Cinemaya 15 (1992): 4-8.
Scruggs, Bert M. “The Postcolonial Appearance of Colonial Taiwan: Film and Memory.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 2 (2013): 194-213.
[Abstract: This preliminary consideration of genre and memory explores the appearance of colonial Taiwan in the work of Japanese and Taiwan filmmakers. Visuality and identification in cinema, the pragmatic and affective dimensions of memory, and the colonial and postcolonial viewing subject are discussed. Also noted in this essay are the apparatuses of recording and reproducing music and the human voice, ideologies, and time in Taiwan during the twentieth century. The examination of postcolonial and colonial documentaries and postcolonial fiction films suggests that colonial filmmakers often demonstrate a utopian outlook, while postcolonial cinema tends to adopt a dystopian, retrospective gaze. These examinations, in turn, comprise a reflection, on multiple levels, of diegetic register and on the uniquely Taiwanese visual and aural aspects of these multi-lingual films. In summary, this article is an attempt to highlight the powerful and sometimes subversive uses of film in the propagation and circulation of a postcolonial Taiwanese identity which transcends national boundaries, and the polarizing, moribund research that they engender, so that scholars might better understand the postcolonial condition.]
Shen, Shiao-Ying. “Where Has All the Capital Gone? The State of Taiwan’s Film Investment.” Cinemaya 30 (Aut. 1995): 4-12.
—–. “Locating Feminine Writing in Taiwan Cinema: A Study of Yang Hui-shang’s Body and Sylvia Chang’s Siao Yu.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 115-23. Rpt. in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 267-79.
—–. “A Morning in Taipei: Bai Jingrui’s Frustrated Debut.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 4, 1 (March 2010): 51-56.
[Abstract: This short essay introduces Taibei zhi chen/A Morning in Taipei, Bai Jingrui’s filmic debut made for the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC) in 1964. This article probes the background of this ‘long-lost’ short, analyzes the film’s style in relation to the aesthetic preference of CMPC’s executive Gong Hong, and evaluates the film in the context of the director’s later stylistic evolution. Through an examination of this short film, this study shows Bai’s penchant for stylistic experimentation and fondness for cinematic representation of Taiwan’s urban life.]
Sheng, Virginia. “The Father Figure of Taiwan Film.” Free China Review (Feb. 1995): 20-23.
Shiau, Hong-Chi. “Marketing Boys’ Love: Taiwan’s Independent Film, Eternal Summer, and Its Audiences.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 157-71.
Shih, Evelyn. “Getting the Last Laugh: Opera Legacy, Comedy, and Camp as Attraction in the Late Years of Taiyupian.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 3 (Oct. 2013): 241-62.
[Abstract: This article looks at the re-emergence of a cinema of attraction in the last years of taiyupian, a Hoklo topolect cinema created in Taiwan. Why were these years the ‘last’, and who was watching? This article makes use of newspaper articles, advertisements, and the numbers, but focuses on questions of style. The 1969 film Zhang Di Seeks A-Zu, featuring pop singer Zhang Di and opera star Yang Lihua, well articulates the comedic and camp aesthetics of this period, as well as the renewed importance of opera culture across different media. These aesthetics gesture towards a particular audience and viewing culture, while offering alternative values to classical realist cinema.]
—–. “Two Fools: Comedy as Dialectical Tension in mid-century Chinese Cinemas.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 2 (2018): 127-41.
[Abstract: Essay traces the complex lineage of Brother Wang and Brother Liu in Taiwanese cinema, beginning with the emergence of a ‘two fools’ (兩傻) genre in imported cinema from Hollywood and Hong Kong, a category which included classic Laurel and Hardy, late Abbott and Costello, the more contemporary Martin and Lewis, Cantonese song and dance film and Mandarin comedies from Cathay featuring the likes of King Hu, Liu Enjia and Jiang Guangchao. When the two fools genre was adapted in Taiwan, an additional social allegory of mainlander and islander solidarity came to the fore: thin actor Zhong Fucai was a local, while fat actor Li Guanzhang arrived from mainland China after 1949. Their unshakeable solidarity and many shared feasts suggest a utopian dimension to the comedy duo, in which homosocial friendship transcends all differences. The visual iconicity of their bodies sharing the frame and the low quality of sound in taiyupian meant that these films often leaned upon the plasmatic appeal of physical comedy instead of dialogue for comic effect, an aesthetic that would continue to dominate taiyupian comedies until the end of the 1960s.]
—–. “No Longer Bond’s Girl: Historical Displacements of the Top Female Spy in 1960s Taiyupian.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 72-75.
Shih, Shu-mei. “Gender and a Geopolitical Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed.Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 278-307.
Significant Others: A Celebration of Cinema by Taiwanese Women (NY, August 2000).
Silvio, Teri. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2019. [MCLC Resource Center review by Evelyn Shih]
[Abstract: The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of animation. Cartoon characters are everywhere—in cinema, television, and video games and as brand logos. There are new technological objects that seem to have lives of their own—from Facebook algorithms that suggest products for us to buy to robots that respond to human facial expressions. The ubiquity of animation is not a trivial side-effect of the development of digital technologies and the globalization of media markets. Rather, it points to a paradigm shift. In the last century, performance became a key term in academic and popular discourse: The idea that we construct identities through our gestures and speech proved extremely useful for thinking about many aspects of social life. The present volume proposes an anthropological concept of animation as a contrast and complement to performance: The idea that we construct social others by projecting parts of ourselves out into the world might prove useful for thinking about such topics as climate crisis, corporate branding, and social media. Like performance, animation can serve as a platform for comparisons of different cultures and historical eras. Teri Silvio presents an anthropology of animation through a detailed ethnographic account of how characters, objects, and abstract concepts are invested with lives, personalities, and powers—and how people interact with them—in contemporary Taiwan. The practices analyzed include the worship of wooden statues of Buddhist and Daoist deities and the recent craze for cute vinyl versions of these deities, as well as a wildly popular video fantasy series performed by puppets. She reveals that animation is, like performance, a concept that works differently in different contexts, and that animation practices are deeply informed by local traditions of thinking about the relationships between body and soul, spiritual power and the material world. The case of Taiwan, where Chinese traditions merge with Japanese and American popular culture, uncovers alternatives to seeing animation as either an expression of animism or as “playing God.” Looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation will help us rethink relationships between global and local, identity and otherness, human and non-human.]
Sterk, Darryl. “Ironic Indigenous Primitivism: Taiwan’s First ‘Native Feature’ in an Era of Ethnic Tourism.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 3 (2014): 209-225.
[Abstract: How do contemporary indigenous filmmakers regard primitivism? By way of reply, this article examines Laha Mebow’s appropriation of a primitive Sayun in her 2011 film Finding Sayun. ‘The beautiful maiden’ Sayun was used in the 1943 Japanese film Sayon’s Bell to promote wartime mobilization in Taiwan, and has been used since the 1990s in local branding. Mebow seems ambivalent about Sayun: she identifies with Sayun, or at least with the Sayun inFinding Sayun, yet never loses critical distance. Mebow’s ambivalence plays out as generic hybridity: Finding Sayun is at once a metafilm, a documentary and a search for roots. Her ambivalence also plays out as irony, and this article argues that, in an era of ethnic tourism, ironic indigenous primitivism is a tactic of packaging a community and then getting a viewer or visitor to open up the package and see what’s inside.]
Su, Chih-heng. “Colour Glass Ceiling: The Life and Death of Taiwanese-language Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 76-87.
A Survey of the Motion Picture Industry in the Republic of China. Taipei: Kwang Hwa, n.d.
Tan, See-Kam and Annette Aw. “The Love Eterne: Almost a (Heterosexual) Love Story.” In Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus II. Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 160-66.
Tsai, Beth. Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Revisits Taiwan New Cinema in relation to film festivals from cultural, historical, and geopolitical standpoints. Look at the productive roles women have played as discursive mediators of the cultural imaginary of the nation, the auteur, and the art of slow cinema. Offers accounts of the film festival’s role in both commissioning and exhibiting films. Examines film aesthetics influenced by directors’ diasporic identities, moving across different regions and nations, such as Malaysia, France, Japan, Myanmar, and Taiwan. Provides in-depth case studies on films by three Taiwan-based directors: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Midi Z/Zhao Deyin. Complements the scope of and discussions on transnational cinema. Taiwan New Cinema (first wave, 1982–1989; second wave, 1990 onward) has a unique history regarding film festivals, particularly in the way these films are circulated at major European film festivals. It shares a common formalist concern about cinematic modernism with its Western counterparts, departing from previous modes of filmmaking that were preoccupied with nostalgically romanticizing China’s image.]
Tweedie, James. “Morning in the New Metropolis: Taipei and the Gobalization of the City Film.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds.,Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 116-30.
Udden, James. “Taiwan New Cinema: A Movement of Unintended Consequences.” Frontier of Literary Studies in China 7, 2 (2013): 159-82.
[Abstract: Taiwan New Cinema movement that began in the 1980s is arguably one of Taiwan’s greatest cultural breakthroughs; the movement eventually led to numerous awards for Taiwanese filmmakers at the biggest festivals, such as Venice, Berlin and Cannes. This implies that the New Cinema movement was ultimately the result of a carefully orchestrated policy on the part of the Taiwan authority. In truth, however, the New Cinema was more accidental than planned. The initial factors behind the movement were more domestic in orientation than foreign; the movement represented a makeshift attempt to save a domestic film industry that was slowly dying. The multiple awards received by Taiwanese filmmakers were thus unexpected benefits, which the authority and others were slow to recognize. Regardless of its origins, however, the New Cinema’s lasting impact is undeniable. To this day, many of the controversies first raised about the New Cinema remain core issues for Taiwan cinema.]
—–. “Taiwanese Comedies under the Shadow of the Chinese Market.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, 2 (2018): 174-86.
[Abstract: Comedy is arguably the most local of genres. Tropical Fish (1995) is a Taiwanese comedy that made no effort to disguise its local flavour, and was largely unseen outside of Taiwan. Recent Taiwanese comedies such as You Are the Apple of My Eye (2011), The Wonderful Wedding (2015) and Our Times (2015) have achieved not only success in Taiwan, but also unprecedented box office in the mainland Chinese market. Compared to Tropical Fish, all three films also seemingly tone down the local flavour to varying degrees. This is due to the irresistible pull of recent opportunities posed by the astronomical growth of the mainland Chinese market. This paper will analyze the economic forces that have resulted in changes in Taiwanese comedies themselves while at the same time showing that there are varying textual strategies for dealing with the ‘local’ flavour in this new economic climate where the booming Chinese market now has become a major consideration.]
Wang, Chun-chi. “Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu pian through a Comparative Study of Japanese and Taiyu pian Melodramas.” The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 6, 1 (Dec. 2012): 71-102.
—–. “A Lurking Amivalence: The Discourse on Female Taiyupian Stars’ Experiences in Hong Kong.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 20 (2020): 101-14.
Wang, George Chun Han. “A Brief History of Taiwanese Comedy Cinema.” Archiv orientální 90, 3 (2022): 595-616.
Wang, Junqi 王君琦, ed. Baibian qianhuan busiyi: Taiyu pian hunxie yu zhuanhua 百變千幻不思議台語片混血與轉化 (Taiwanese-Language cinema: History, discovery, transculturation, boundary crossing, transnationalism, creolization). Taibei: Guojia dianying zhongxin, 2017.
Wang, Sharon Chialan. “To Love and Freedom: Post-martial Law Subjectivity in Detention and Your Name Engraved Herein.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, 2 (Winter 2022): 345-75.
Wang, Shujen. Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.
Wang, Tung. “Banana Paradise.” Cinemaya 12 (1991): 52-53.
Wang, Wei. “Taipei in Transformation: Taiwanese Cinema from the 80s to the 90s.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 62-63.
Wicks, James. “Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Early Films by Xie Jin and Li Xing.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 1 (Spring 2009): 174-212.
—–. “Projecting a State that Does Not Exist: Bai Jingrui’s Jia zai Taibei/Home Sweet Home.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 4, 1 (March 2010): 15-26.
[Abstract: The opening sequence of Bai Jingrui’s Jia zai Taiei/Home Sweet Home (1970) introduces the film’s central concern: the politics, both aesthetically and ideologically, of depicting migration within a narrative film. More specifically, Home Sweet Home provides an insight into the official position that the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang, KMT) held with regard to Taiwanese students who studied abroad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article presents a schematic historical contextualization of the film and Bai Jingrui’s biographical background. I then focus on potential discrepancies between the projection of state policy and the formal elements of editing, setting and representations of psychological turmoil among the film’s primary characters. My goal is to offer a preliminary inquiry into how the structural components of the film work in both conjunction and disjunction with the ideology of the Taiwanese state government in 1970.]
—–. “Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother and Taiwan Cinema of the Early 1970s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 118-32.
—–. Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2014.
Williams, Tony. “The Road to Invincible Asia: Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia’s Taiwanese Films.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1-31.
Wilson, Flannery. “Filmming Disappearance or Renewal? The Ever-Changing Representations of Taipei in Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema.” Senses of Cinema 59 (2011).
—–. New Taiwanese Cinema in Focus: Moving Within and Beyond the Frame. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
[Abstract: In the Taiwanese film industry, the dichotomy between ‘art-house’ and commercially viable films is heavily emphasized. However, since the democratization of the political landscape in Taiwan, Taiwanese cinema has become internationally fluid. As the case studies in this book demonstrate, filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee each engage with international audience expectations. New Taiwanese Cinema in Focus therefore presents the Taiwanese New Wave and Second Wave movements with an emphasis on intertextuality, citation and trans-cultural dialogue. Wilson argues that the cinema of Taiwan since the 1980s should be read emblematically; that is, as a representation of the greater paradox that exists in national and transnational cinema studies. She argues that these unlikely relationships create the need for a new way of thinking about ‘transnationalism’ altogether, making this an essential read for advanced students and scholars in both Film Studies and Asian Studies.]
Wu, Chia-Chi. “Festivals, Criticism and International Reputation of Taiwan New Cinema.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 75-91.
Wu, Chia-rong. “Spectralizing the White Terror: Horror, Trauma, and the Ghost-Island Narrative in Detention.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 1 (March 2021): 73-86.
[Abstract: This article treats the Detention franchise as a cultural phenomenon from three interrelated angles. First, this article examines the historical significance and political reconstruction of the White Terror in response to the development and adaptation of Detention, while taking into account its multi-layered source material in history, cult culture, literature, and cinema. Historically bound, Detention blends foreign and local horror, fostering the gamers’ and viewers’ imagination of darkness embedded in the realm of the unknown and the dead. Second, this article brings into focus the mix of historical pain and horror genre with respect to the ghostly youth and monstrous past in Detention. The digital and cinematic remakes of the White Terror mediate the unaccountable trauma via the techno-enhanced immersive horror across screens. This unique strategy speaks to the gamers and spectators alike, especially the young generation, with profundity in the new age of entertainment. Third, this article identifies Detention as a political allegory in relation to the socio-cultural anxieties shared by the majority of the Taiwanese subjects in the contemporary era. In a political light, it not only echoes the ongoing campaign of transitional justice as promoted by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on the island, but also points to the universal pursuit of freedom and democracy against any totalitarian regime in the twenty-first century.]
Wu, Meiling. “Postsadness Taiwan New Cinema: Eat, Drink, Everyman, Everywoman.” In Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 76-95.
Yang, Jeff. Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese Cinema. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Yang, Panpan. “The Taste of Ice Kacang: Xiaoqingxin Film as the Possible Prospect of Taiwan Popular Cinema.” IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies 2, 1 (2016): 74-84.
[Abstract: Although Xiaoqingxin Film has been widely recognized as a new sub-genre in Chinese-language film circle, it rarely received sustained academic attention in either Chinese or English publications. In this article, I would explore the contours of Xiaoqingxin Film in four aspects: (1) a tentative definition; (2) a style analysis; (3) a cause analysis: why Taiwan has overwhelming superiority in making this sub-genre; (4) a unique distribution mode. To provide a style analysis of Xiaoqingxin Film, I will not only observe its script, sound and cinematography, but also look into its genre bending. To conduct a media capital analysis of Xiaoqingxin Film, I would borrow the concept of “media capital” from Michael Curtin and pay particular attention to the fact that co-productions between Taiwan and Mainland China are popping up as Taiwan has relaxed trade embargoes with Mainland China. As shown by the successive box-office hits, the pan-Asian commercial success of Xiaoqingxin Film is not a one-hit wonder. Rather, in this sub-genre, I believe, lies the possible prospect of Taiwan popular cinema.]
Yang, Qiong. “Tales of Encounter: A Case Study of Science Fiction Films in Greater China in the 1970s and 1980s.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 3 (2015): 436-52.
[Abstract: An important motif in science fiction films is the encounter between different species—usually between human kind and alien kind. In films of this type, both anxieties and hopes are imagined and exhibited. By examining three science fiction films made in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese mainland in the late 1970s and early 1980s—that is, The Super Inframan(Zhongguo chaoren, 1975), God of War (Zhanshen, 1976), and Death Ray on Coral Island (Shanhudao shang de siguang, 1980)—this paper analyzes the ideologies and anxieties behind such encounters. These films present different “Chinese” pictures, revealing the fluidity of Chineseness, as well as the variety of frameworks within the genre of Chinese-language science fiction films. In this time of globalization, it is important to examine these early science fiction films in order to explore the relation between local social concerns and their artistic presentation.]
Ye Longyan 葉龍彥. Guangfu chuqi Taiwan dianying shi 光復初期台灣電影史 (A history of Taiwan cinema in the early postwar period). Taipei: Guojia dianying ziliaoguan, 1995.
Yeh, Emily Yueh-yu. “The Road Home: Stylistic Renovations of Chinese Mandarin Classics.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds.,Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 203-16.
Yeh, Emily Yueh-yu and Darrell Davis. Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island. NY: Columbia UP, 2005. [Columbia UP abstract] [MCLC Resource Center review by James Tweedie]
Yeh, Emily Yueh-u, Darrell Davis, and Wenchi Lin, eds. Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022.
[Abstract: covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging “New and Post-New Cinema,” or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan’s moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture. Film-by-film is conceived as the main carrier of moving picture imagery for a majority of viewers, across the world. The curation offers an array of formal, historical, genre, sexual, social, and political frames, which provide a rich brew of contexts. This surfeit of meanings is carried by individual films, one by one, which breaks down abstractions into narrative bites and outsized emotions.]
Yeh, Long-Yann. “Historical Analysis of ‘Taipei Experience’ in Taiwanese-language Cinema.” In Chen Ruxiu, ed., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei (Focus on Taipei through Cinema). Taipei: Wanxiang, 1995, 42-43.
Yip, June. “Taiwanese New Cinema.” In Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, 711-13.
—–. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
[Abstract: In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island—with its complex history of colonization—presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a “nation.” While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, in Taiwan, government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of consumer culture have made the island a truly global space. Envisioning Taiwan sorts through these complexities, skillfully weaving together history and cultural analysis to give a picture of Taiwanese identity and a lesson on the usefulness and the limits of contemporary cultural theory. Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island’s most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t’u (or “nativist”) literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsiang-t’u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan’s assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray in vibrant detail daily life on the island. Through Hwang’s and Hou’s work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores “the imagining of a nation” on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity toward a more fluid, postmodern hybridity—an evolution that reflects both Taiwan’s peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.]
—–. “Toward the Postmodern: Taiwanese New Cinema and Alternative Visions of Nation.” In Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 49-48.
Yue, Ming-Bao. “There Is No Place like Home: The Politics of Diasporic Identification in and around Taiwan Films of the 60s and 70s.” Postcolonial Studies6, 2 (2003): 207-21.
Zhang, Yingjin. “Cinematic Remapping of Taipei: Cultural Hybridization, Heterotopias, and Postmodernity.” Conference Paper, Remapping Taiwan (Oct. 13-15, 2000).
—–. “Articulating Sadness, Gendering Space: The Politics and Poetics of Taiyu Films from 1960s Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 1 (Spring 2013): 1-46.
Zhou, Xuelin. Youth Culture in Chinese Language Films. NY: Routledge, 2017.
[Abstract: This book explores the vigorous film cultures of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong from the perspective of youth culture. The book relates this important topic to the wider social, cultural, and institutional context, and discusses the relationship between the films and the changes that today are transforming each society. Among the areas explored are the differences between the three film industries, their creation of new types of screen hero and heroine, and their conflicts with traditional Chinese attitudes such as respect for age. The many films discussed provide fresh perspectives on the ways in which young people are coping with gender, sexuality, class, coming of age, the pressures of education, and major social shifts such as rural to urban migration. They show young adults in each society striving to construct new value systems for a complex, rapidly changing environment.]
Hong Kong
Abbas, Ackar. “The New Hong Kong Cinema and the Deja Disparu.” Discourse 16, 3 (1994): 65-77.
—–. “Dialectics of Deception.” Public Culture 11, 2 (1999): 347-63. [Project Muse link]
Aitken, Ian and Michael Ingham. Hong Kong Documentary Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
[Abstract: Does Hong Kong have a significant tradition in documentary filmmaking? Until recently, many film scholars believed not. Yet, when Ian Aitken and Michael Ingham challenged this assumption, they discovered a rich cinematic tradition, dating back to the 1890s. Under-researched and often forgotten, documentary film-making in Hong Kong includes a thriving independent documentary film movement, a large archive of documentaries made by the colonial film units, and a number of classic British Official Films. Case studies from all three categories are examined in this book, including The Battle of Shanghai, The Sea and the Sky, Rising Sun and The Hong Kong Case. In-depth discussion and analysis of more recent Hong Kong independent documentaries focuses on works such as Cheung King-wai’s KJ: A Life in Music and films by Tammy Cheung and Evans Chan. With a particular focus on how these films address the historico-political dimension of their time, Hong Kong Documentary Film introduces students and scholars in Film Studies to this fascinating and largely unexplored cinematic tradition.]
Anderson, D. Aaron. “Violent Dances in Martial Arts Films.” Jump Cut 44 (Fall 2001).
—–. “Asian Martial-Arts Cinema, Dance, and the Cultural Languages of Gender.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 190-202.
Baird, David. “Hongkong’s Theatre and Motion Picture Industry.” Far Eastern Economic Review (Oct. 14, 1954): 497-501.
Ball, Liam. “Legend of The Chinese Boxer: Jimmy Wang Yu’s Cosmopolitan Wuxia Pian.” Asian Cinema 34, 1 (2023): 21-38.
[Abstract: The response to Jimmy Wang Yu’s death in April 2022 revealed the symptoms of undercelebration: while every professional obituary recognized the late filmmaker’s importance, few could explain why without inaccuracy or misattribution. This resonates with a long tradition of subjugating Wang’s work within the context of other, much more integral figures, in which the cultural and economic motivators for his filmic aesthetics are insufficiently considered. Similarly, various elements of Wang’s work, especially his purported anti-Japanism, have long been subjected to conjecture and simplification, or else an overreliance on the incorporation of biographical details into textual analyses of his films. This article aims to disentangle and clarify the myths and misconceptions that complicate the story of Wang’s career. To avoid repeating prior mistakes – i.e., to prevent the narrative distortion of associated figures within Wang’s narrative – the article will use the political economy of cinema as a guiding framework. The overall aim is to present a decentralized view of The Chinese Boxer (1970) to evaluate the cultural and material factors that motivated Wang’s career peak and the film for which he is most remembered.]
Barnard, Timothy P. “The Shaw Brothers’ Malay Films.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 154-73.
Berry, Chris. “Heterogeneity as Identity: Hybridity and Transnationality in Hong Kong and Taiwanese Cinema.” Metro 91 (1992): 48-51.
Berry, Michael. “SARS @ Hong Kong: A Brief Pathology of a Cinema of Disease.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 3-4 (2022): 70-77.
[Abstract: In 2003, a new series of feature length films appeared in Hong Kong depicting the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic. These films presented the public health crisis through a perspective of optimism, solidarity, and overcoming. Several of the films borrowed elements from popular genre cinema, employed major Hong Kong celebrities, and adopted a group cinema format. But how did films like City of SARS, Golden Chicken 2, and 1:99 differ from earlier films about disease in Hong Kong? By presenting a juxtaposition between a series of mainstream SARS films and Herman Yau’s 1996 film The Ebola Syndrome, this article explores how cultural discourse about disease retracts and takes a markedly conservative turn during moments of public health crisis.]
Bettinson, Gary. “The Shaw Brothers Meet Hammer: Coproduction, Coherence, and Cult Film Criteria.” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 122-37.
Bettinson, Gary and Daniel Martin, eds. Hong Kong Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
[TOC: Ch 1: What Can a Neoi Gwei Teach Us? Adaptation as Reincarnation in Hong Kong Horror of the 1950s; Raymond Tsang; Ch 2: The White Snake in Hong Kong Horror Cinema: From Horrific Tales to Crowd Pleasers; Liang Luo; Ch 3: From Killer Snakes to Taxi Hunters: Hong Kong Horror in an Exploitation Context; Andy Willis; Ch 4: The Enduring Cult of The Bride with White Hair: Chivalry and the Monstrous Other in the Hong Kong Fantasy-Horror; Daniel Martin; Ch 5: Animated Pasts and Unseen Futures: On the Comic Element in Hong Kong Horror; Andrew Grossman; Ch. 6: Performing (Comic) Abjection in the Hong Kong Ghost Story; Felicia Chan; Ch 7: Hands, Fingers, and Fists: ‘Grasping’ Hong Kong Horror Films; David Scott Diffrient; Ch 8: Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films: Police Procedural Colludes with Supernatural-Martial Arts Cinema; Kenneth Chan; Ch 9: Cross-Border Implications: Transnational Haunting, Gender, and the Persistent Look of The Eye; Enrique Ajuria Ibarra; Ch 10: Food for Thought: Cannibalism in The Untold Story and Dumplings; Lisa Odham Stokes; Ch 11: Sympathy for the Slasher: Strategies of Character Engagement in Pang Ho-cheung’s Dream Home; Gary Bettinson; Ch 12: Ghostly Returns: The Politics of Horror in Hong Kong Cinema; Vivian Lee]
Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. [reviewed by Shelley Kraicer]
—–. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expression.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 73-94.
Bren, Frank. “A Century Of Chinese Cinema: The 25th Hong Kong International Film Festival and Beyond.” Senses of Cinema 14 (2001).
Chan, Evans. “Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 294-322.
Chan, Joseph M, Anthony Y. H. Fung, and Chun Hung Ng. Policies for the Sustainable Development of the Hong Kong Film Industry. HK: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010.
Chan, Kenneth. “The Contemporary Wuxia Revival: Genre Remaking and the Hollywood Transnational Factor.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 150-57.
Chan, Natalia Sui Hung. “Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostalgia Cinema and Its Social Practice.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. NY: Cambridge UP, 2000, 252-72.
Chan, Stephen Ching-kiu. “Figures of Hope and the Filmic Imaginary of Jianghu in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema.” Cultural Studies 15, 3/4 (July 2001): 486-514.
[Abstract: Through an extensive allegorical reading of films, this paper attempts to capture a certain cultural form of imagination in Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the historical handover of power in 1997. Dwelling on the world of signification conjured up through what I call the jianghu filmic imaginary,the analysis focuses on the ideological and utopian impulses registered in relation to a whole emotional complex of anxiety, bewilderment and despair in the works of some highly creative local filmmakers of the genre: Ching Siu-Tong, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark and Wong KarWai. The study draws theoretically from Castoriadis’s notion of the social imaginary and Bloch’s aesthetics of hope, to focus on the textual and contextual re-constructions of a number of very unconventional martial arts swordplay (wuxia) films made in Hong Kong in the last two decades: namely, Tsui’s Butterfly Murders (1979), Hui’s Romance of Book and Sword (1987), Ching/Tsui’s Swordsman II (1992), and Wong’s Ashes of Time (1994). By identifying the ideological and affective moments in the filmic imaginary,I want to trace what has been left in a ruined culture for utopian longings, and point to the presence/absence of ‘hope’ as the cultural imagination for an unknown and unknowable future (beyond 1997). It is my contention that an understanding of that peculiar form of popular imaginary at the unusual juncture of Hong Kong’s history can begin with a critical attempt to cope with this subtle practice of hope, so as to recognize (or reject) it as mediation in the process of our collective cultural crisis, anticipation and identification.]
Chang, Jing Jing. Screening Communities: Negotiating Narratives of Empire, Nation, and the Cold War in Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
[Abstract: Postwar Hong Kong cinema played an active role in building the colony’s community in the 1950s and 1960s. To Jing Jing Chang, the screening of movies in postwar Hong Kong was a process of showing the filmmakers’ visions for Hong Kong society and simultaneously an attempt to conceal their anxieties and mask their political agenda. It was a time when the city was a site of intense ideological struggles among the colonial government, Chinese Nationalists, and Communist sympathizers. The medium of film was recognized as a powerful tool for public persuasion and various camps competed to win over the hearts and minds of the audience. Screening Communities thus situates the history of postwar Hong Kong cinema at the intersection of Cold War politics, Chinese culture, and local society.]
Chang, Li-Mei. “Whose Fatal Ways: Mapping the Boundary and Consuming the Other in Border Crossing Films.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 177-89.
Charles, John. The Hong Kong Filmography, 1977-1997: A Complete Reference to 1,100 Films Produced by British Hong Kong Studios. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000.
Chen, Hazel Shu. “Acoustically Embodied: Film Adaptations of Radio Storytelling in 1950s Hong Kong.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 18, 1 (2021): 114-37.
[Abstract: In 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong, radio permeated in everyday life as a major source of entertainment and information. It subsequently gave rise to a peculiar genre in Cantonese cinema, film adaptations of “airwave novels” (天空小說電影), which flourished in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to the records of the Hong Kong Film Archive, from 1949 to 1968 there were ninety-three film adaptations of radio novels and dramas. Besides drawing the historical contours of the radio-film network in the postwar colonial city, this article studies two exemplary radio stories-turned-films, Niehai chihun 孽海痴魂 (A Devoted Soul; 1949) and Cimu lei 慈母淚 (A Mother’s Tears; 1953), and scrutinizes their transmedial/transnational adaptation trajectories to shed light on intermedia aesthetic criticisms. This article describes how film technology reconstituted the oral and spoken in audiovisual space, in particular the embodiment and representation of the radio acoustic. The voice-over, indicative of the radio unconscious in the film, registers the existence of a consciousness already programmed by radio sounds that reconfigures the economy of filmic diegesis. This article further investigates how such medium self-reflexivity in the form of voice-overs destabilized the Manichean structure of melodrama as an established genre in Cantonese cinema, thus making space for forms of female agency amidst contending ideologies in early Cold War.]
Cheng, Pei-Pei. “Reminiscences of the Life of an Actress in Shaw Brothers’ Movietown.” Trs. Jing Jing Chang and Jeff McClain. In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 246-54.
Cheng, Xiangyang. “Affect, Folklore and Cantonese Opera Film.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 3 (2014): 226-43.
Cheuk, Pak-Tong. “The Beginning of the Hong Kong New Wave: The Interactive Relationship Between Television and the Film Industry.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999): 10-27.
—–. Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1978-2000). Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2008. [see press blurb]
[Abstract: maps the birth and eventual decline of celebrated ‘New Wave’ in a fascinating and thorough manner. Tong relates the movement to a wider historical context of the developing society and culture of Hong Kong at that time. His study of the celebrated golden age of Hong Kong film contextualises ‘New Wave’ and describes its wide-reaching effects upon contemporary cinema in Hong Kong, the greater China region and far beyond. ]
Cheung, Esther M.K. and Chu Yiu-wai, eds. Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.
Chi, Robert. “Hong Kong Cinema Before 1980.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 75-94.
Chiao, Hsiung-ping. Xianggang dianying fengmao (Style of Hong Kong cinema). Taipei: Shibao, 1987.
—–. “The Distinct Taiwanese and Hong Kong Cinemas.” In Chris Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1991.
The China Factor in Hong Kong Cinema (Xianggang dianying di Zhongguo mailuo). Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1990.
Cho, Allan. The Hong Kong Wuxia Movie: Identity and Politics, 1966-1976. Saarbrucken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010.
[Abstract: In examining the production and reception of the wuxia movie in Hong Kong during the 1960s and 1970s, this book argues that the popularity of the genre was more than just entertainment value. Its warm reception by audiences not only in Hong Kong, but in large parts of the Chinese diaspora, was because the wuxia pian — known as the martial arts movie to the West — had belonged to a long historical literary and political culture that traces back to China’s imperial past. Far from a novelty, the wuxia pian was a modernized visual medium with themes and characters that were already familiar to people who read and watched plays, operas, and wuxia novels. Moreover, wuxia filmmakers were not mere imitators of the latest cinematic advances from Hollywood, but instead were innovators interested in recreating the splendor of the past through cinema, drawing inspiration from traditional stories, music, and fighting techniques while experimenting with western film technology and theory. Through the looking glass of popular culture, this book explores what defined Chineseness in one of the most chaotic and fractious periods of Chinese history.]
Chong, Woei Lien, “Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung: Two Chinese Highlights at the 2001 International Rotterdam Film Festival.” China Information 15, 1 (2001): 166-196.
Chow, Yiu-fai and Jeroen de Kloet. “Flânerie and Acrophilia in the Postmetropolis: Rooftops in Hong Kong Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 2 (2013): 139-55.
Choy, Howard Y.F. “Schizophrenic Hong Kong: Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Infernal Affairs Trilogy.” Transtexts(e)s transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 3 (2007).
Chu, Blanche. “The Ambivalence of History: Nostalgia Films Understood in the Post-Colonial Context.” Hong Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin 8/9 (Spring/Summer 1998): 41-54.
Chu, Rolanda. “Swordsman II and The East is Red: The ‘Hong Kong Film,’ Entertainment, and Gender.” Bright Lights Film Journal 13 (1994): 30-35, 46.
Chu, Yingchi. Hong Kong Cinema and National Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self. Ph.d diss. Perth: Murdoch University, 2000.
—–. Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self. New York, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
Chu, Yiu-wai. “(In)authentic Hong Kong: The ‘(G)local’ Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 147-56.
—–. “Toward a New Hong Kong Cinema: Beyond Mainland-Hong Kong Co-productions.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 2 (2015): 111-124.
Chute, David, ed. “Midsection: Made in Hongkong.” Film Comment 24, 3 (June 1988): 34-56.
Ciecko, Anne T. “Transnational Action: John Woo, Hong Kong, Hollywood.” In Sheldon Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.
—– and Sheldon Lu. “The Heroic Trio: Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh: Self-Reflexivity and the Globalization of the Hong Kong Action Heroine.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999).
Coe, Jason G. “Serial Authentication: Gamifying Hong Kong Action Cinema in Sleeping Dogs.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 1 (2019): 26-41.
Collier, Joelle. “A Repetition Compulsion: Discontinuity Editing, Classical Chinese Aesthetics, and Hong Kong’s Culture of Disappearance.” Asian Cinema10, 2 (Spring/Summer 1999): 67-79.
Coogan, Pat. “Smoking Dragon.” bcmagazine 13 (Jan. 17, 2002). [overview of HK film in the year 2001]
Cunliffe, Tom. “Tracing the Science Fiction Genre in Hong Kong Cinema.” In Kenneth Chan and Andrew Stuckey, eds., Sino-Enchantment: The Fantastics in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 128-48.
Curry, Ramona. “Bridging the Pacific with Love Eterne.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Borthers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 174-98.
Curtin, Michael. “Industry on Fire: The Cultural Economy of Hong Kong Media.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999): 28-51.
Dancer, Greg. “Film Style and Performance: Comedy and Kung Fu from Hong Kong.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 42-50.
Dannen, Fredric and Barry Long. Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider’s Guide to the Hollywood of the East. NY: Hyperion, 1997.
De Seife, Ethan. “Chang Che.” Senses of Cinema–Great Directors, a Critical Database.
Desslandes, Jeanne. “They Programmed Her to Kill: Black Cat, a Hong Kong Remake of Nikita.” Tamkang Review (Winter 2002): 107-26.
Desser, David. “The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema’s First American Reception.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 19-43.
—–. “Diaspora and National Identity: Exporting ‘China’ through the Hong Kong Cinema.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 124-36.
—–. “Fists of Legend: Constructing Chinese Identity in the Hong Kong Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 280-97.
Du, Ying. “Censorship, Regulations, and the Cinematic Cold War in Hong Kong.” The China Review 17, 1 (Feb. 2017): 117–151.
—–. “Hong Kong Leftist Cinema in the Cold War Era: In-betweenness, Sensational Success and Censorship.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 1 (2019): 93-108.
[Abstract: Using Shanghai archives supplemented by US and Hong Kong archives, this paper explores the complex circumstances of Hong Kong’s leftist cinema – from its cultural identification to its production and distribution – within the PRC’s context of both tightening and sometimes relaxing its controls over films, and the international context of the cinematic Cold War between mainland China, the United States and Taiwan. It shows how Hong Kong’s leftist cinema built up an ‘in-between’ identity by conflating entertainment and edification, PRC concerns and the Hong Kong experience, and how it struggled to survive the multiple political confinements imposed by the Hong Kong government and the US and Taiwanese powers in Hong Kong, and the PRC’s periodic policies in the 1950s and 1960s. This paper argues that the dynamics of Hong Kong leftist cinema came from their dislocated position in both the socialist system/mainland China and the capitalist system/Hong Kong; meanwhile Hong Kong leftist cinemas’ difficulties lay in the border-crossing limits between the two systems.]
Eberhard, Wolfram. The Chinese Silver Screen: Hong Kong and Taiwanese Motion Pictures in the 1960s. Taibei: Orient Culture Service, 1972.
Eng, Michael. “Reforming Vengeance: Kung Fu and the Racial Melancholia of Chinese Masculinity.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 269-300.
Fan, Victor. Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
[Abstract: Examining how HK filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with this perturbation between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book traces how Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. Extraterritoriality scrutinises creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries – especially those by marginalised artists – actively rewriting and reconfiguring how Hong Kong cinema and media are to be defined and located.]
—–. “Code-Mixing and Code-Switching in Classical Hong Kong Cinemas.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 49, 1 (2023): 27-47.
[Abstract: Code-switching and -mixing have been prominent in Hong Kongers’ speech patterns. Yet, cinematic representations of these two practices seem to be rare in studio-produced films and have only emerged in experimental and independent films since the 1990s. In this article, I argue that the discrepancy between the commonplaceness of code-switching and -mixing in Hong Kongers’ everyday speech and its lack of representation in the cinema is deceptive. If we understand code-switching and -mixing not only as an interlinguistic practice, but also as intertopolectic (between different topolects) and intratopolectic (between registers of a topolect of language), code-switching and -mixing have always been part of Hong Kong cinema as narrational devices. Moreover, in some cinematic cases, code-switching and -mixing may be transposed to the level of film forms. In this article, I will first provide an overview of how code-switching and -mixing in Hong Kong have been discussed by linguists and point out some blind spots in their arguments. I will then conduct a comparative investigation into Cantonese literature and classical Cantonese cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s and demonstrate how interlinguistic, intertopolectic, and intratopolectic switching and mixing have always been part of it. I will then conduct a similar investigation into Cold War Mandarin literature in Hong Kong and its use of code-switching and -mixing, which will shed light on how Mandarin cinema in the 1950s transposes these practices to film forms. In both cases, code-switching and -mixing in the cinema negotiate the conflicting social relationships of the time.]
Feng, Lin. “Star Endorsement and Hong Kong Cinema: The Social Mobility of Chow Yun-fat, 1986-1995.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, 3 (Nov. 2012): 269-.
[Abstract: Cinema has long been connected with the mass consumption in our society. This article uses Chinese star Chow Yun-fat as a case study to investigate the construction of a male star’s image as fashion and lifestyle icon in Hong Kong’s consumer culture between 1986 and 1995. In addition to examining the Chow’s star image in local advertisements released during the period of time, this article also explores the complex interaction of Chow’s cinematic persona with his extra-cinematic image in Hong Kong’s consumer culture. This article argues that the interaction between Chow’s on-screen images and his presence in consumer commercials creates a public space for Hong Kong’s new middle-class citizens to articulate the rise of their political and economic power, and to openly express their emerging sense of self.]
Feng, Peter X. “False Consciousness and Double Conscioiusness: Race, Virtual Reality, and the Assimiliation of Hong Kong Action Cinema in The Matrix.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 9-21.
Fonfrède, Julien. Cinéma de Hong-Kong. Montréal: Île de la tortue, 1999.
Fonoroff, Paul. “A Brief History of the Hong Kong Cinema.” Renditions 29.30 (1988): 293-308.
—–. “King of the Island: Chow Yun-Fat.” Cinemaya 10 (1990/91): 58-59.
—–. Silver Light: A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema, 1920-1970. HK: Joint Publishing, 1997.
—–. At the Hong Kong Movies: 600 Reviews from 1988 Till the Handover. Odyssey Publications, 1999.
Ford, Stacilee. Mabel Cheung Yuen-Ting’s An Autumn’s Tale. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.
Fore, Steve. “Golden Harvest Films and the Hong Kong Movie Industry in the Realm of Globalization.” The Velvet Light Trap 34 (Fall 1994): 40-58.
—–. “Home, Migration, Identity: Hong Kong Film Workers Join the Chinese Diaspora.” In Law Kar and Stephen Teo, eds., Fifty Years of Electric Shadows. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1997, 126-135. (Chinese and English versions). Rpt. in Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai, eds., Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema. New York: Oxford UP, 2004, 85-100.
—–. “Introduction: Hong Kong Movies, Critical Time Warps, and Shapes of Things to Come.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999): 2-9.
—–. guest ed. Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999).
Fu, Poshek and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. NY: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Fu, Poshek. “Patriotism or Profit: Hong Kong Cinema During the Second World War.” In Law Kar, ed., Early Images of Hong Kong and China: Program of the 19th Hong Kong International Film Festival. HK: Urban Council, 1995, 73-79.
—–. “The 1960s: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 71-89.
—–. “Between Nationalism and Colonialism: Mainland Emigres, Marginal Culture, and Hong Kong Cinema 1937-1941.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 199-226.
—–. Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
—–. “Modernity, Diasporic Capital, and 1950s Hong Kong Mandarin Cinema.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).
—–. “Cold War Politics and Hong Kong Mandarin Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 116-33.
—–. “More than Just Entertaining: Cinematic Containment and Asia’s Cold War in Hong Kong, 1949–1959.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, 2 (Fall 2018): 1-55.
—–. “Entertainment and Propaganda: Hong Kong Cinema and Asia’s Cold War.” In Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. NY: Routledge, 2019.
—–. Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. [MCLC Resource Center review by Man-Fung Yip]
[Abstract: Explores the war between Communist China, Nationalist Taiwan, and the United States and its relation to Hong Kong cinema and media. Illuminates the role of U.S. intervention in the British colony’s media industry and cinematic warfare. Presents the first systematic study of Hong Kong’s cultural Cold War.]
—–, ed. China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and the Making of Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Gan, Wendy. “The Hong Kong Local on Film: Re-imagining the Global.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).
Garcia, Roger. “Alive and Kicking: The Kung-fu Film Is a Legend.” Bright Lights Film Journal 31 (January 2001).
Gateward, Frances. “Wong Fei-hung in Da House: Hong Kong Martial-Arts Films and Hip-Hop Culture.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 51-67.
Grossman, Andrew. “The Rise of Homosexuality and the Dawn of Communism in Hong Kong Film: 1993-1998.” In Grossman, ed., Queer Asian Film: Shadows in the Shade. NY: Harrington Press, 2000, 149-86.
—–. “Homosexual Men (and Lesbian Men) in a Heterosexual Genre: Three Gangster Films from Hong Kong.” In Grossman, ed., Queer Asian Film: Shadows in the Shade. NY: Harrington Press, 2000, 237-72.
—–. “Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Horror, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of ‘Category III.'” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 201-24.
Hall, Ken. “Hong Kong, 1997; Mexico, 1917. Motifs and Historical Perspective.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 51-57.
Hammond, Stefan and Mike Wilkins. Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head: The Essential Guide to Hong Kong’s Mind-Bending Films. NY: Fireside/Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Hastie, Amelie. “Fashion, Femininity, and Historical Design: The Visual Texture of Three Hong Kong Films.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999): 52-69.
Ho, Sam. “The Hong Kong Indie: New Times, New Art.” Cinemaya 61/62 (Winter/Spring 2003). 4-10.
Hoover, Michael and Lisa Stokes. “A City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema as Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 25-31.
—–. City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema. London: Verso, 1999.
The Hong Kong Filmography. 3 vols. [vol. I: 1913-1941, vol. II: 1941-1949, vol. III: 1950-1952]. HK: HK Film Archive.
Huang, Michelle Tsung-yi. “Hong Kong Blue: Flaneurie with the Camera’s Eye in a Phantasmagoric Global City.” Journal of Narrative Theory (Winter 2000).
—–. “Conceiving Cross-Border Communities: Mobile Women in Recent Hong Kong Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 134-51.
Hung, Natalia Chan Sui. “Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostaligia Cinema and Its Social Practice.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 252-72.
Hunt, Leon. “Dragons Forever: Chinese Martial Arts Stars.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 141-49.
Glaessner, Verina. Kungfu: Cinema of Vengeance. London: Lorimer, 1974.
Jarvie, I. C. Window on Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of the Hongkong Film Industry and its Audience. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Center for Asian Studies, 1977.
Kato, M. T . From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution and Popular Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. [publisher’s blurb]
Kei, Sek. “Achievement and Crisis: Hong Kong Cinema in the 80s.” Bright Lights Film Journal 31 (Jan. 2001).
Kei, Sek, Roland Chu, and Grant Foerster. “A Brief History of the HK Martial Arts Film.” Bright Lights Film Journal 31 (Jan. 2001).
Kleinhans, Chuck. “Becoming Hollywood? Hong Kong Cinema in the New Century.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 109-21.
Kong, Kam Yoke. “In Profile: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Playing the Role, Living the Part.” Cinemaya 49 (2000): 28-35.
Kong, Lily. “Shaw Cinema Enterprise and Understanding Cultural Industries.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Borthers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 27-56.
Kowallis, Jon. “The Diaspora in Postmodern Taiwan and Hong Kong Film: Framing Stan Lai’s The Peach Blossom Land with Allen Fong’s Ah Ying.” In Sheldon Lu, ed. 1997.
Kraicer, Shelly. “Help!!! (Lashou huichen, Hong Kong 2000).” Senses of Cinema 12 (2001).
—–. “Chinese Language Films at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival.” MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2004. [reviews films from mainland China and Hong Kong]
Lai, Linda Chiu-han. “Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 231-50.
Lam, Charles and Genevieve Leung. “Examining the Emergence of Hong Kong Identity: A Critical Study of the 1970s Cantonese Sketch Comedy, The Hui Brothers Show.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 8, 2 (2022): 205-221.
[Abstract: Research on Hong Kong identity has focused on several pivotal periods (the 1997 Handover, and the 2014 and 2019 protests), which situates local, postcolonial Hong Kong identity as oppositional to a national Chinese identity. While these time points are critical, it is also important to attend to earlier Hong Kong media, including humorous works. Better understanding of how Hong Kong humour operates expands our knowledge about humour, identity and media studies beyond the prolific cinematic output. This article reports on the content analysis of 8.8 hours of the sketch comedy show, 雙星報喜 (The Hui Brothers Show) 1971–72. The Hui brothers broke the ‘two fools’ tradition of vernacularized and self-deprecating comedy by incorporating content reflecting Hongkongers’ everyday experience and coinciding with a rise in television viewership. We report three representative themes: (1) luxury and novelty, (2) social commentaries and behaviour governance and (3) the normalization and centring of working-class lifestyles as ‘Hong Kong’ lifestyles. We argue that these themes from the 1970s have planted the seeds to Hong Kong identity boundaries that have been (re)constructed and (re)imagined in contemporary Hong Kong history thus offering opportunities for collective self-reflection about what it meant to be a Hongkonger then and what it means now.]
Law, Kar. “The American Connection in Early Hong Kong Cinema.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 44-71.
—–. “Crisis and Opportunity: Crossing Borders in Hong Kong Cinema, Its Development form th 40s to th 70s.” In Kar Law ed., Border Crossing in Hong Kong Cinema. HK: Leisure and Cultural Services Department, 2000, 116-122.
—–. “An Overview of Hong Kong’s New Wave Cinema.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 31-50.
—–. “Shaw’s Cantonese Productions and Their Interactions with Contemporary Local and Hollywood Cinema.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Borthers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 57-73.
—–, ed. Cinema of Two Cities: Hong Kong-Shanghai. The 18th Hong Kong International Film Festival. HK: Urban Council, 1994.
—–, ed. Border Crossing in Hong Kong Cinema. HK: Leisure and Cultural Services Department, 2000.
—– and Frank Bren. Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross Cultural View. Scarecrow Press, 2004.
Lau, [Jenny] Kwok Wah. A Cultural Interpretation of the Popular Cinema of China and Hong Kong, 1981-1985. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University, 1989.
—–. “A Cultural Interpretation of the Popular Cinema of China and Hongkong” in Berry ed. Perspectives on Chinese Film. London: British Film Institute, 1991. 166-74.
—–. “Besides Fists and Blood: Hong Kong Comedy and Its Master of the Eighties.” Cinema Journal 37, 2 (Winter 1998): 18-34.
—–. “Besides Fists and Blood: Michaeil Hui and Cantonese Comedy.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 158-75.
Law, Wing-Sang. “The Violence of Time and Memory Undercover: Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, 3 (Sept. 2006): 383-402.
Lau, Dorothy. “Donnie Yen’s Wing Chun Body as a Cyber-intertext.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 2 (2013): 157-73.
Lau, Shing-hon, ed. A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Filmm. HK: Fourth International Film Festival, 1980.
—–. A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film 1945-80. HK: Fifth International Film Festival, 1981.
Law, Fiona Yuk-wa. “City of Laughter: On the Traditions and Trends of Hong Kong Comedy Films.” Archiv orientální 90, 3 (2022): 575-93.
Leary, Charles. “Internal Affairs: High Concept in Hong Kong.” Senses of Cinema 26 (May-June 2003). [review of 2002 film Internal Affairs]
—–. “Electric Shadows of an Airplane: Hong Kong Cinema, World Cinema.” In Leon Hunt and Wing-fai Leung, eds., East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. NY: I. B. Taurus, 2008, 57-69.
Lee, Amy. “Narratives As Tools for Interpretation: Hong Kong Life through the Lens of 1970s’ Cinema.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, 3 (2010): 470-77.
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. “Two Films from Hong Kong: Parody and Allegory.” In Nick Browne, Paul Pickowicz, Vivian Sochack, and Esther Yau, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 202-15.
—–. “Tales from the ‘Floating City.” Harvard Asia Pacific Review (Winter 1996/97).
—–. “Hong Kong Movies in Hollywood.” Harvard Asia Pacific Review (Winter 1998/99).
Lee, Susie J. “Theorizing Intervention: The Presence of Hong Kong Cinema in Asian America.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring 2004): 248-64.
Lee, Vivian P. Y. Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: The Post-Nostaligic Imagination. NY: PalgraveMcMillan, 2009.
[TOC: Introduction: Nostalgia, Memory and Local Histories in Hong Kongs Post-1997 Cinescape. PART I: TIME AND MEMORY: Post-Nostalgia: In the Mood for Love and 2046; Cinematic Remembrances: Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung; Allegory, Kinship, and Redemption: Fu Bo and Isabella. PART II: SCHIZOPHRENIA, AMNESIA AND CINEPHILIA: Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Johnnie Tos Urban Legends; The Kung Fu Hero in the Digital Age: Stephen Chows Glocal Strategies; Karmic Redemption: Memory and Schizophrenia in Hong Kong Action Films. PART III: IN AND OUT: Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)locating the China Imaginary; Outside the Nation: the Pan-Asian Trajectory of Applause Pictures]
—–. “Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)locating the China Imaginary in Post-1997 Hong Kong Films.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 10, 1 (Summer 2010).
—–. “The Hong Kong New Wave: A Critical Re-appraisal.” In Song Hwee Lim, ed., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 2011, 131-39.
—–. “The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Typology of Hong Kong Cinema.” Telos 197 (Winter 2021): 35-55.
Leong, Toh Hai. “Erotic Cinema of Li Han Hsiang and Chu Yuan at the SIFF.” Kinema (Fall 2004): 113-115.
Leung, Grace and Joseph Chen. “The Hong Kong Cinema and Its Overseas Market: A Historical Review, 1950-1995.” In Law Kar and Stephen Teo, ed., Fifty Years of Electric Shadows. HK: Urban Council, 1997.
Leung, Helen Hok-sze. “Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema.” positions 9, 2 (Fall 2001): 423-447. [Project Muse link]
—–. “Uncertain Triangles: Lesbian Desire in Hong Kong Cinema.” In Tineke Hellwig and Sunera Thobani, eds, Asian Women: Interconnections. Toronto: CSPI/Women’s Press, 2005, 185-202.
—–. “Disappearing Fences: Bisexuality and Cross-Dressing in Two Hong Kong Comedies.” In Gina Marchetti, See Kam Tan, and Peter Feng, eds., Chinese Connections: Film, Diaspora, and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, forthcoming.
—–. “Unsung Heroes: Reading Transgender Subjectivities in Hong Kong Action Cinema.” In Laikwan Pang and Day Wong Kit-mui, eds., Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. 81-98. Reprinted in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds, The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006, 685-697.
—–. “Disappearing Faces: Bisexuality and Transvestism in Two Hong Kong Comedies.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 152-64.
Leung, N.K. “Hong Kong Cinema: China and 1997.” In John Hill and Pamela Gibson, eds. World Cinema: Critical Approaches. NY: Oxford UP, 2000, 170-72.
Leung, Ping-kwan. “Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 227-51.
Leung, Wing-fai. “Infernal Affairs and Kung-fu Hustle: Panacea, Placebo, and Hong Kong Cinema.” In Leon Hunt and Wing-fai Leung, eds., East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. NY: I. B. Taurus, 2008, 71-87.
Li, Cheuk-to, ed. A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies. HK: Eighth International Film Festival, 1984.
—–. “Popular Cinema in Hong Kong.” In Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, 704-11.
—–. “The Return of the Father: Hong Kong New Wave and Its Chinese Context in the 1980s.” In Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Indentities, Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 160-179.
Li, Ding-Tsann. “A Colonized Empire: Reflections on the Expansion of Hong Kong Films in Asian Countries.” In Kuan-Hsing Chen, ed., Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1998, 122-41.
Li Hanxiang 李翰祥. Sanshinian xishuo congtou 三十年細說從頭 (Detailed account of my thirty-year career). 3 vols. Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1984.
Li, Jessica Tsuiyan. “Ambiguous Agency: Commercial Surrogacy in Yi Shu’s A Complicated Story and Its Film Adaptation.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 45, 2 (June 2018): 290-99.
Li, Siu Leung. “Kung Fu: Negotiating Nationalism and Modernity.” Cultural Studies 15, 3/4/ (July 2001): 515-42.
[Abstract: ‘Kung fu’, as a cultural imaginary consecrated in Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s, was constituted in a flux of nationalism. This paper argues that the kung fu imaginary found in Hong Kong kung fu cinema is imbued with an underlying self-dismantling operation that denies its own effectiveness in modern life, and betrays an ‘originary’ moment of heterogeneity, an origin of itself as already ‘impurely Chinese’. Having been British-colonized, westernized, capitalist-polluted and culturally hybrid, Hong Kong’s relation with ‘Chineseness’ is at best an ambivalent one. This ambivalence embodies a critical significance of Hong Kong as a defusing hybrid other within a dominant centralizing Chinese ideology, which is itself showing signs of falling apart through complex changes imposed by global capital. Hong Kong’s kung fu imaginary, which operates in a self-negating mode, is instructive when read as a tactic of intervention at the historical turn from colonial modernity to the city’s reluctant return to the fatherland. The kung fu imaginary enacts a continuous unveiling of its own incoherence, and registers Hong Kong’s anxious process of self-invention. If Hong Kong’s colonial history makes the city a troublesome supplement, then the ‘Hong Kong cultural imaginary’ will always be latently subversive, taking to task delusive forms of ‘unitary national imagination’.]
—–. “Embracing Glocalization and Hong Kong-made Musical Film.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Borthers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 74-94.
Li Youxin 李幼新, ed. Gang Tai liu da daoyan 港台六大導演 (Six major directors in Hong Kong and Taiwan). Taipei: Zili wanbao she, 1986.
Liang Bingjun (Leung Ping-kwan). “Minzu dianying yu Xianggang wenhua shenfen: cong Bawang bieji, Qiwang, Ruan Lingyu kan wenhua dingwei” 民族電影與香港文化身分：從《霸王別姬》，《棋王》，《阮玲玉》看文化定位 (National film and Hongkong cultural identity). Jintian 3 (1994): 193-204.
Lin, Niantong, ed. Cantonese Cinema Retrospective, 1950-59. HK: Second International Film Festival, 1978.
—–. Hong Kong Cinema Survey 1946-68. HK: Third International Film Festival, 1978.
Lin, Ting-ying. “Everyday Resistance, Female Agency, and Identity Politics: Code-Switching as Tactic in Still Human.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 49, 1 (2023): 49-66.
Lo, Kwai-Cheung. Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Culture of Hong Kong. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. [examines film, newspaper culture, theme parks, and kung-fu comics, as well as the interaction of the HK film industry with Hollywood, Lo uncovers HK’s “transnational” identity defined in terms of complex relationships with mainland Chna, other diasporic communities (like Taiwan), and the West]
—–. “There Is No Such Thing as Asia: Racial Particularities in the ‘Asian’ Films of Hong Kong and Japan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005): 133-58.
Logan, Bey. Hong Kong Action Cinema. New York: Overlook Press, 1996.
Lu, Sheldon H.. “Filming Diaspora and Identity: Hong Kong and 1997.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 273-88.
—–. “Hong Kong Diaspora Film and Transnational TV Drama: From Homecoming and Exile to Flexible Citizenship.” Post Script 20, 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2001): 137-46. Rpt. in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 298-311.
—–. “Diaspora, Citizenship, Nationality: Hong Kong and 1997.” In Lu, ed., China, Trannational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 104-21.
Lu, Sheldon H. and Anne T. Ciecko. “The Heroic Trio: Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh–Self Relexivity and the Globalization of the Hong Kong Action Heroine.” In Lu, ed., China, Trannational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 122-38.
“Made in Hong Kong.” Special issue of Cahiers du Cinema (September, 1984).
Mai, Xin’en 麥欣恩. Xianggang dianying yu Xinjiapo: Lengzhan shidai XingGang wenhua lianji, 1950-65 香港電影與新加坡冷戰時代星港文化連擊, 1950-65 (Hong Kong Cinema and Singapore: a cultural ring between two cities, 1950-1965). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
Marchetti, Gina. “Buying American, Consuming Hong Kong: Cultural Commerce, Fantasies of Identity, and the Cinema.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 289-314.
—–. “Transnational Exchanges, Questions of Culture, and Global Cinema: Defining the Dynamics of Changing Relationships.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 251-76.
—–. “The Hong Kong New Wave.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 95-117.
—–. “Handover Bodies in a Feminist Frame: Two Hong Kong Women Filmmakers’ Perspectives on Sex after 1997.” Screen Bodies 2, 2 (Dec 2017): 1-24.
[Abstract: Hong Kong women have been taking up the camera to explore the changing nature of their identity. Linking the depiction of the gendered body with the demand for women’s rights as sexual citizens, several directors have examined changing attitudes toward women’s sexuality. Yau Ching, for example, interrogates the issues of sex work, the internet, and lesbian desire in Ho Yuk: Let’s Love Hong Kong (2002). Barbara Wong’s documentary, Women’s Private Parts (2001), however, uses the televisual talking head interview and observational camera to highlight the way women view their bodies within contemporary Chinese culture. By examining the common ground shared by these very different films, a vision of women’s sexuality emerges that highlights Hong Kong women’s struggle for full sexual citizenship.]
Mazzilli, Mary. “Female Chinese Stars on Screen: Desiring the Bodies of Ruan Lingyu and Linda Lin Dai.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 69-94.
Mintz, Marilyn D. The Martial Arts Film. South Brunswick, NJ: Barnes, 1978.
Morris, Meaghan, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, eds. Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.
Needham, Benjamin. “Fashioning Modernity: Hollywood and the Hong Kong Musical, 1957-64.” In Leon Hunt and Wing-fai Leung, eds., East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. NY: I. B. Taurus, 2008, 41-56.
Ng, Benjamin Wai-ming. “Japanese Elements in Hong Kong Erotic Films.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 217-24.
—–. “When Sadako Meets Mr. Vampire: The Impact of Ringu on Hong Kong Ghost Films.” Asian Cinema 19, 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 143-56.
Ng, Kenny K. K. “Romantic Comedies of Cathay-MP&GI in the 1950s and 60s: Language, Locality, and Urban Character.” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).
—–. “Inhibition vs. Exhibition: Political Censorship of Chinese and Foreign Cinemas in Postwar Hong Kong.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 23-36.
[Abstract: This article traces clandestine film censorship in colonial Hong Kong during the Cold War. Based on film studio records, press coverage, historical accounts, and recently declassified government documents, albeit limited and incomplete, the article examines sample cases and controversial foreign and Chinese films to throw light on the predicament of cross-border film exhibition in a distinctively politicized period. The evidence and arguments in this study point to a different conceptualization of transnationality and boundary-crossing of cinema grounded in its specific historical and geopolitical configuration. It is less about the easy traffic of capital, human resources, commodities, and ideas across the border than the dangerous trafficking of movie images, ideologies, human actions and propagandas that could destabilize the territorial boundary and its political status quo. Film screening and viewing in the colony are subject to strict official surveillance to quarantine the visuality of politics in the shadow of Cold War paranoia.]
—–. “The Screenwriter as Cultural Broker: Travels of Zhang Ailing’s Comedy of Love.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 131-84.
—–. “Screening without China: Transregional Cinematic Smuggling between Cold War Taiwan and Colonial Hong Kong.” The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 1 (2020).
[Abstract: How can research into film policy inform us about the nature of power and cultural politics regarding film censorship? How does censorship affect the aesthetics and identity of film-making produced under political and market constraints? Focusing on the geopolitical regions of British Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, this article delineates the impact of British colonial film censorship and the politics of cinematically representing revolutionary China during the Cold War. It reveals that British Hong Kong censors changed their strategy in the 1970s and 80s from suppressing mainland Chinese films to inhibiting films that might offend China from screening in Hong Kong. The evidence points to a distinctive picture of transregional smuggling and cinematic boundary-crossing, namely, the dangerous trafficking and interception of movie images, ideologies, and propaganda. Film screening of ‘China’ in Hong Kong and Taiwan was subject to strict official surveillance to quarantine undesirable public visuality and political discourses. The study examines film’s ambiguous expressions of China and Chineseness as it constantly negotiated the factors of colonialism, Chinese nationalism, and Cold War transnational politics.]
—–. “Cosmopolitanism from Below: Union Film’s Adaptation of World Classics.” positions: asia critique 31, 3 (2023): 623-48.
[Abstract: Cosmopolitanism promises to go beyond national thinking and tradition-bound parochialism by reemphasizing the interconnectedness of individuals, communities, and cultures. This article probes the politics of adaptation of the left-leaning Cantonese Union Film Enterprise (Zhonglian 中聯, 1952–1967) in colonial Hong Kong, and scrutinizes how it embraced world literary classics to enhance the prestige of Cantonese films. It focuses on three 1955 adaptations: An Orphan’s Tragedy (Guxing xuelei 孤星血淚; from Great Expectations), Anna (Chuncan mengduan 春殘夢斷; from Anna Karenina), and Eternal Love (Tianchang dijiu 天長地久; from Sister Carrie). The founding of Union was a conscientious response of Cantonese film workers to the call of the Cantonese Film Clean-up Campaign (Yueyu dianying qingjie yundong 粵語電影清潔運動) in the 1940s, launched by leftist filmmakers from Shanghai (Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生, Situ Huimin 司徒慧敏) and supported by Cantonese film leaders Ng Cho-fan 吳楚帆 and Lo Duen 盧敦. The study interrogates the predicaments and vicissitudes of Union’s cosmopolitan stances as it wrestled with the cultural politics of Chinese cinema during the Cold War. It elucidates the ethnically rooted and culturally cosmopolitan Cantonese progressive cinema. The social realism represented by Union is not local or passé. The Union artists envisioned from below a humane and cosmopolitan community inhabited by workers and intellectuals, locals and diasporic Chinese subjects, which connects people beyond their parochialism and nationhood.]
Ono, Yoko. “Lost Heroes: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Japanese and Hong Kong Gangster Films.” Asian Cinema 16, 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 147-54.
Palmer, August Lee and Jenny Kwok Wah Lau. “Of Executioners and Courtesans: The Performance of Gender in Hong Kong Cinema of the 1990s.” In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ed., Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003, 203-21.
Pang, Laikwan. “The Distribution and Reception of Hong Kong Films in Mainland China.” In Stephanie Donald, Michael Keane, and Yin Hong, eds., Media Futures in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. London: Curzon Press, 2001.
—–. “Masculinity in Crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and Post 1997 Hong Kong Cinema.” Feminist Media Studies 2, 3 (Fall 2002): 325-40.
Pang, Laikwan and Day Kiu-miu Wong, eds. Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.
Pecic, Zoran Lee. New Queer Sinophone Cinema: Local Histories, Transnational Connections. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. [chapters on Zhang Yuan, Yan Yan Mak, and Zero Chou]
Pickowicz, Paul G. “Three Readings of Hong Kong Nocturne.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Borthers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 95-114.
Reynaud, Berenice. “Hong Kong.” Cinemaya 33 (1996): 53-54.
—–. “The Book, the Goddess and the Hero: Sexual Politics in the Chinese Martial Arts Film.” Senses of Cinema 26 (May-June, 2003).
Rist, Peter. “Neglected ‘Classical’ Periods: Hong Kong and Korean Cinemas of the 1960s.” Asian Cinema 12, 1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 49-66.
Rodriguez, Hector. “Hong Kong Popular Culture as an Interpretive Arena: The Huang Feihong Film Series.” Screen 38, 1 (1997): 1-24.
—–. “The Emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 53-69.
—–. “Organizational Hegemony in the Hong Kong Cinema.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999): 107-19.
Rojas, Carlos. “Specular Failure and Spectral Returns in Two Films with Maggie Cheung (and one without).” Sense of Cinema 12 (2001).
Roosen-Runge, Lisa. “The 25th Annual Hong Kong International Film Festival (April 6-21 2001): A Report.” Senses of Cinema 14 (2001).
—–. “The 26th Annual Hong Kong International Film Festival–A Report.” Senses of Cinema 20 (May-June 2002).
Ryan, Barbara. “Blood, Brothers, and Hong Kong Gangster Movies: Pop Culture Commentary on ‘One China’.” In John A. Lent, ed., Asian Popular Culture. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, 61-77.
Sarkar, Bhaskar. “Hong Kong Hysteria: Martial Arts Tales from a Mutating World.” In Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 159-76.
Schroeder, Andrew. “All Roads Lead to Hong Kong: Martial Arts, Digital Effects and the Labour of Empire in Contemporary Action Film.” EHHCSS 1 (Jan. 2002).
Shih, Shu-mei. “Gender and a Geopolitical Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed.Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 278-307.
Shu, Kei, ed. Cantonese Cinema Retrospective, 1960-69. HK: Sixth International Film Festival, 1982.
—–. A Comparative Study of Post-war Mandarin and Cantonese Cinema. Hong Kong: Seventh International Film Festival, 1983.
Singer, Michael. “Chow Must Go On.” Film Comment 24 (1988): 46-47.
Stockbridge, Sally. “Sexual Violence and Hong Kong Films: Regulation and Cultural Difference.” Media Information Australia 74 (1994): 86-92.
Stokes, Lisa Odham and Michael Hoover. City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema. London; New York: Verso, 1999.
—–. “Like Father, Like Son: Yuen Wo-ping’s Iron Monkey and the Evolution of Wong Fei-hung.” Asian Cinema 12, 2 (Fall/Winter 2001): 110-18.
—–. “Food Fight, Food Fight: Culture and Economy in Chicken and Duck Talk.” Asian Cinema 14, 2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 170-79.
Stringer, Julian. “Category 3: Sex and Violence in Postmodern Hong Kong.” In Christopher Sharrett, ed., Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.
—–. “Cultural Identity and Disaspora in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema.” In Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu, eds., Asian American Screen Cultures. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
—–. “Problems with the Treatment of Hong Kong Cinema as Camp.” Asian Cinema 8, 2 (Winter 1996-97): 44-65.
—–. Blazing Passions: Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. [press blurb]
Sun, Shaoyi. “Women and The Labyrinth of History: Reflections on The Soong Sisters.” Unpublished manuscript on the Asian Connections website.
Sun, Yi. “In Defense of Hong Kong: The Critical Reception of Milkyway Image Films.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30, 2 (Fall 2018): 1-55.
—–. “Critical Formation of Hong Kong Noir: Historiographical and Methodological Reflections.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 1 (March 2021): 39-55.
[Abstract: The critical formation of Hong Kong noir has been a conspicuous and ever-growing thread running through the scholarship on Hong Kong cinema for some time. This essay charts the history of and methodological grounds for the critical formation of Hong Kong noir, while providing historiographical reflections more generally on the field of Hong Kong cinema studies and on the tantalizing idea of a global film history. Dividing the history of the critical formation of Hong Kong noir into two phases, this essay discusses the development of Hong Kong noir as a critical category from ‘Kowloon Noir’ and ‘Tsim Sha Tsui noir’ to ‘Hong Kong neo-noir’ and ‘Hong Kong noir’ in conceptual terms. It also reflects on the methodological shifts in the study of noir-esque Hong Kong films from synchronic to diachronic approaches, from the perspective of localism to that of world film history, and from auteurism and reflectionism to historical poetics. In particular, it suggests that a wider application of the problem/solution perspective, which emerged in the second phase of this history, is imperative to fill gaps and correct misunderstandings in narrations of Hong Kong noir.]
Szeto, Kin-Yan. “Specters of Capital: Hong Kong Cinema in a Border/less World.” Jump Cut 45 (Fall 2002). [review of Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)].
—–. “Jackie Chan’s Cosmopolitical Consciousness and Comic Displacement.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 229-60.
—–. The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.
[Abstract: Kin-Yan Szeto critically examines three of the most internationally famous martial arts film artists to arise out of the Chinese diaspora and travel far from their homelands to find commercial success in the world at large: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan. Positing the idea that these filmmakers’ success is evidence of a “cosmopolitical awareness” arising from their cross-cultural ideological engagements and geopolitical displacements, Szeto demonstrates how this unique perspective allows these three filmmakers to develop and act in the transnational environment of media production, distribution, and consumption…]
Szeto, Mirana M. and Yun-Chung Chen. “Mainlandization or Sinophone Translocality? Challenges for Hong SAR New Wave Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 2 (2012): 115-34.
[Abstract: The seeming revival of Hong Kong cinema through Hong Kong-China co-productions catered increasingly to the China market allowing major Hong Kong creative talents to prosper and even influence industry conventions and infrastructure in China. However, Hong Kong below-the-line jobs are increasingly replaced by those from China, making such careers unsustainable. Such ‘mainlandized’ co-productions find the more liberal Sinophone communities of Hong Kong and South East Asia harder to penetrate. Mainlandization and Hollywoodization in all Sinophone markets threatens Hong Kong film with ontological crisis. In this context, the Special Administrative Region (SAR) New Wave and their new generation of post-1980s audience make us wonder if cultural articulations that go beyond vertically imagined colonial/national identity politics are still possible; whether sensitive portrayals of inter-local Sinophone dialogues, the kind of creole translocality from below that has characterized much Hong Kong film productions are still viable, without giving up a decent China market.]
Tan, See Kam. “The Hongkong Cantonese Vernacular as Cultural Resistance.” Cineyama 20 (1993); 12-15.
—–. “Hong Kong Cinema: Double Marginalization and Cultural Resistance.” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Sciences 22 (1994): 53-71.
—–. “The Cross-Gender Performances of Yam Kim-Fei, or The Queer Factor in Postwar Hong Kong Cantonese Opera/Opera Films.” In Andrew Grossman, ed., Queer Asian Film: Shadows in the Shade. NY: Harrington Press, 2000, 201-12.
—–. “Huangmei Opera Films, Shaw Brothers and Ling Bo: Chaste Love Stories, Genderless Cross-dressers and Sexless Gender-plays?” Jump Cut 49 (Spring 2007).
Tan, See Kam. Hong Kong Cinema and Sinophone Transnationalisms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: explores the intricate complexity of selected films and film-making practices from 1930s Hong Kong (and Shanghai) to the later ‘new wave’ phenomenon of the 1980s. The result is a Sinophone cinema that created some very different ways of understanding ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’, developing their own ‘cosmopolitan dreaming’ within the cultural and economic changes of those times. Exploring sinification and its multiple manifestations in film, the book examines cinematic genres including Huangmei Opera films, qiqing (strange or queer romance) films, fanchuaners (professional cross-sex performers) in film, Hong Kong’s Bond Movies (bangpian), erotic (fengyue) films, and New Wave Hong Kong cinema. In doing so, this book lays fruitful foundations for further understanding the development and changing faces of Hong Kong films and sinophone transnationalism in the even more complex and changing times of today.]
Tan, See Kam and Annette Aw. “Love Eterne: Almost a (Heterosexual) Love Story.” In Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, 137-43.
Tateishi, Ramie. “Jackie Chan and the Reinvention of Tradition.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 78-84.
Taylor, Jeremy. Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinema: The Amoy-dialect Film Industry in Postwar Asia. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: The Amoy-dialect film industry thrived in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia in the 1950s. Film in Amoy dialect, a dialect of Chinese, reflects a particular period in the history of the Chinese diaspora, and has been little studied due to its ambiguous place within the wider realm of Chinese and East Asian film history. This book represents the first full length, critical study of the origin, the significant rise and the rapid decline of the Amoy-dialect film industry in post-war Asia. Rather than examining the industry for its own sake, it focuses on its broader cultural, political and economic significance in the region. In particular, it questions many of the assumptions that are currently being made about the ‘recentness’ of transnationalism in Chinese cultural production, as well as the prominence given to ‘the nation’ and ‘nation-building’ in studies of Chinese cinemas and of the Chinese Diaspora. By examining a cinema that was not ‘national’, not grounded in any particular national tradition, and largely unconcerned with the ‘nation-building’ project in post-war Asia, this book challenges the very terms of reference within which many studies of film have been conducted.]
Teng, Sue-Feng. “From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan-The Kungfu Film Carries On.” Sinorama (Jun. 1996): 28-35.
Teo, Stephen. “Hong Kong Cinema: Discovery and Prediscovery.” In John Hill and Pamela Gibson, eds. World Cinema: Critical Approaches. NY: Oxford UP, 2000, 166-70.
—–. “Hong Kong Cinema: Hearing Asian Voices.” In 1990 Hawaii International Film Festival Viewer’s Guide. Honolulu: East-West Center, 1990.
—–. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute, 1997.
—–. “Local and Global Identity: Wither Hong Kong Cinema?” Senses of Cinema 7 (2000).
—–. “The 1970s: Movement and Transition.” In Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 90-110.
—–. Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2007.
—–. Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009.
[Abstract: The traditional martial arts genre known as wuxia (literally “martial chivalry”) became popular the world over through the phenomenal hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). This book unveils the rich layers of the wuxia tradition as it developed in the early Shanghai cinema of the late 1920s and in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries of the 1950s and beyond. Stephen Teo follows the tradition from its beginnings in Shanghai cinema to its rise as a serialized form in silent cinema and its prohibition in 1931. He shares the fantastic characteristics of the genre, their relationship to folklore, myth, and religion, and their similarities and differences with the kung fu sub-genre of martial arts cinema. He maps the protagonists and heroes of the genre, in particular the figure of the lady knight-errant, and its chief personalities and masterpieces. Directors covered include King Hu, Chu Yuan, Zhang Che, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou, and films discussed are Come Drink With Me (1966), The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), A Touch of Zen (1970-71), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), The Promise(2005), The Banquet (2006), and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006).]
—–. “The Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema: Emergence, Development and Decline.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 103-11.
Tipson, Emma. “Changes Manifest: Time, Memory, and a Changing Hong Kong.” IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies 2, 1 (2016).
Tobias, Mel C. Flashbacks: Hong Kong Cinema after Bruce Lee. Hong Kong: Gulliver Books, 1979.
Tong, Cheuk Pak. Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1976-2000). Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2005.
Tong, Chris. “Toward a Hong Kong Ecocinema.” In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. 171-193.
Tsai, Eva. “Kaneshiro Takeshi: Transnational Stardom and the Media and Culture Industries in Asia Global/Postcolonial Age.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1, (Spring 2005): 100-132.
Veg, Sebastian. “Anatomy of the Ordinary: New Perspectives in Hong Kong Independent Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 1 (2014): 73-92.
Wai, Chu Yiu. “Hybridity and (G)local Identity in Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema.” In Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, 312-28.
Wald, Gayle. “Same Difference: Racial Masculinity in Hong Kong and Cop-Buddy Hybrids.” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds.,Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 68-81.
Wang, Shujen. Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.
Wang, Yiman. “The ‘Transnational’ as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and its Chinese Remakes.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 9-22.
[Abstract: This essay critiques unreflective celebration of transnational Chinese cinema and proposes the ‘transnational’ as methodology. By examining the dual modes of address in a Hong Kong remake of a Lubitsch musical comedy, I demonstrate the importance of scrutinizing border politics and the ‘foreignization’ of Chinese cinema in its transnational production and reception.]
Wang, Yuping. “Alternative New China Cinema: Hong Kong Leftist Cinema during the Cold War — A Discussion of the Hong Kong Leftist Film The True Story of Ah Q.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 1 (2015): 131-45.
Weisser, Thomas. Asian Cult Cinema. New York: Boulevard Books, 1997.
Williams, Tony. “Kwan Tak-Hing and the New Generation.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 71-77.
—–. “Hong Kong Cinema, the Boat People, and To Liv(e).” Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 131-43.
—–. “Under ‘Western Eyes’: The Personal Odyssey of Huang Fei-Hong in Once Upon a Time in China.” Cinema Journal 40, 1 (2000): 3-24.
—–. “Michelle Yeoh: Under Eastern Eyes.” Asian Cinema 12, 2 (Fall/Winter 2001): 119-31.
—–. “Transnational Stardom: The Case of Maggie Cheung Man-yuk.” Asian Cinema 14, 2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 180-96.
—–. “Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia: Last Eastern Star of the Late Twentieth Century.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 2 (July 2008): 147-57.
[Abstract: This article aims to explore the star status of Brigitte Lin according to the concepts pioneered by Richard Dyer in his Stars and Heavenly Bodies monographs. In contrast to most works that examine Lin’s star phenomenon exclusively in terms of her Hong Kong films and ‘Invincible Asia’ role in particular, this study emphasizes the importance of her early Taiwan films made during 1972–84 as well as the transitional Taiwan films of the 1980s directed by Chu Yen Ping when the star sought to change her earlier image. It suggests that Lin was a much more active agent in this process than Tsui Hark. It concludes by noting the significance of the star’s off-screen presence as commentator in two post-retirement films, one of which parallels her well-known Hong Kong star image.]
Willis, Andy. “Painted Skin: Negotiating Mainland China’s Fear of the Supernatural.” Asian Cinema 22, 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 20-30.
Wood, Miles. Cine East: Hong Kong Cinema through the Looking Glass. Guildford: FAB, 1998.
Wong, Ain-ling. “The Black-and-White Wenyi Films of Shaws.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Borthers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 115-32.
Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. “Cities, Cultures and Cassettes: Hong Kong Cinema and Transnational Audiences.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999): 87-106.
Wong, Lily. “Moving Serenades: Hearing the Sinophonic in MP and GI’s Longxiang Fengwu.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 3 (Oct. 2013):
[Abstract: As the first full-coloured film-musical produced in Hong Kong, Longxiang fengwu/Calendar Girl (Tao Qin, 1959) is known for its restaging of 1930s Shanghai oldies and its resulting box office success. This article traces the transpacific and trans- medial meaning-making processes the restaged tunes (lyric and sound) offer so to hear the social spaces, geographies and identities that the intersection of music and cinema can enable, reflect and prophecy. In particular, it discusses the ways the restaged Shanghai oldies in the film ‘move’ technologically, spatially and affectually. That is, in addition to tracking the geopolitics of the musical numbers’ audiospatiality, I listen closely to the ‘structures of feeling’ that shift and mutate through the songs’ travels through time, place and medium. Gesturing towards a ‘Sinophone Geography of Affect’, I argue that it is precisely through these ‘movements’ that the tunes are able to create spaces in which discourses of national and cultural nativity get both contested and consolidated, both sounded and silenced. As such, I submit that it is precisely through these movements that we find openings to complicate both the films’ geopolitical rendering of Cold War-era Sinophone identities, and the disciplinary boundaries that govern past studies of the text in the academy.]
Wong, Wayne. “A Tale of Two Dragons: Politics of the Comedic Kung Fu Body in Chinese Cinema.” Archiv orientální 90, 3 (2022): 503-30.
[Abstract: This article argues that the effacement of the carnivalesque qualities in contemporary kung fu comedy films due to censorship and propaganda presents a dilemma for China’s culturally conservative soft power agenda. Alluding to Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of carnival, the highly adaptive yet grotesque kung fu comedic body in late 1970s Hong Kong poses a challenge to the austere image of traditional kung fu masters established after 1949. With China’s attempt to nationalise kung fu cinema as a propaganda platform after the 1997 handover, the carnivalesque body in kung fu comedy has come to be seen by censorship bodies as regressive and dangerous, undermining not only the nation’s geopolitical ambitions but also the film industry’s continuing efforts to resist the cultural influence of global Hollywood. With the political correctness of the kung fu imaginary emphasising the traditional, the assiduous, and the virtuous, the comedic kung fu body, characteristic of the subversive, the indolent, and the vulgar, can no longer serve as an outlet for the expression of resentments and frustrations. Not only does this change limit the genre’s diversity and development, but it also undermines China’s political imperative of reaffirming the status quo through kung fu comedy. I will illustrate this dilemma through readings of Tanigaki Kenji’s Enter the Fat Dragon (2020) and Dayo Wong’s The Grand Grandmaster (2020).]
Wu Hao 吴昊. Xianggang dianying minsuxue 香港電影民俗學 (Ethnography of Hong Kong film). Hong Kong: Ci wenhua, 1993.
Xianggang dianying de Zhongguo mailuo 香港電影的中國脈絡 (The China factor in Hong Kong cinema). HK International Film Festival, 1990. HK: Shicheng ju, 1997.
Xu, Lanjun. “Contested Chineseness and Third Sister Liu in Singapore and Hong: Songs, Landscape, and Cold War Politics in Asia.” In Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. NY: Routledge, 2019.
Yang, Jeff. Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese Cinema. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Yang, Mingyu. “China: Once Upon A Time / Hong Kong: 1997: A Critical Study of Contemporary Martial Arts Films.” PhD dissertation. University of Maryland, 1995.
Yang, Qiong. “Tales of Encounter: A Case Study of Science Fiction Films in Greater China in the 1970s and 1980s.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 3 (2015): 436-52.
[Abstract: An important motif in science fiction films is the encounter between different species—usually between human kind and alien kind. In films of this type, both anxieties and hopes are imagined and exhibited. By examining three science fiction films made in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese mainland in the late 1970s and early 1980s—that is, The Super Inframan(Zhongguo chaoren, 1975), God of War (Zhanshen, 1976), and Death Ray on Coral Island (Shanhudao shang de siguang, 1980)—this paper analyzes the ideologies and anxieties behind such encounters. These films present different “Chinese” pictures, revealing the fluidity of Chineseness, as well as the variety of frameworks within the genre of Chinese-language science fiction films. In this time of globalization, it is important to examine these early science fiction films in order to explore the relation between local social concerns and their artistic presentation.]
Yau, Ching. Filming Margins: Tang Shu Shuen, a Forgotten Woman Film Director. HK: HK University Press, 2004.
Yau, Esther C.M. “Border Crossing: Mainland China’s Presence in Hong Kong Cinema.” In Nick Browne, Paul Pickowicz, Vivian Sochack, and Esther Yau, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. New York: Cambridge, 180-201.
—–, ed. At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001.
—–. “The Spirits of Capital and Haunting Sounds: Translocal Historicism in Victim (1999).” In See-kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds.,Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009, 249-62.
Yau, Esther and Tony Williams, eds. Hong Kong Neo-Noir. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
[TOC: Ch 1: ‘A Rose by Any Other Name’: Wong Tin-lam’s The Wild, Wild Rose as Melodrama Musical Noir Hybrid, Lisa Odham Stokes; Ch 2: Black & Red: Post-war Hong Kong Noir and Its Interrelation with Progressive Cinema, 1947–1957, Law Kar; Ch 3: Sword, Fist, or Gun? The 1970s Origins of Contemporary Hong Kong Noir, Kristof Van den Troost; Ch 4: Doubled Indemnity: Fruit Chan and the Meta-Fictions of Hong Kong Neo-Noir, Adam Bingham; Ch 5: Running on Karma: Hong Kong Noir and the Political Unconscious, Gina Marchetti; Ch 6: Beyond Hypothermia: Cool Women Killers in Hong Kong Cinema, David Desser; Ch 7: Tech-Noir: A Subgenre may not exist in Hong Kong Science Fiction Films, Kwai-Cheung Lo; Ch 8: Location Filmmaking and the Hong Kong Crime Film: Anatomy of a Scene, Julian Stringer; Ch 9: Running out of Time, Hard-Boiled, and 24-Hour Cityspace, Kenneth E. Hall; Ch 10: Exiled in Macau: Hong Kong Neo-Noir and Paradoxical Lyricism, Jinhee Choi; Ch 11: The Tentacles of History: Shinjuku Incident’s Return of the Repressed, Tony Williams]
Yau, Ka-fai. “3rdness: Filming, Changing, Thinking Hong Kong.” positions 9, 3 (Winter, 2001): 535-558. [Project Muse link]
—–. “Cinema 3: Towards a ‘Minor Hong Kong Cinema.'” Cultural Studies 15, 3/4 (July 2001): 543-63.
[Abstract: This article canvasses the way Hong Kong cinema became modern, at the moment and the place when/where it had to come up with new cinematic images in response to new geo-historical situations. I call it a ‘minor Hong Kong cinema’ in the sense that it is a cinema that deterritorializes within the heart of what is considered major. This minor cinema is not at all just a cinema at the margin. It is rather a strategy to conceptualize and develop certain suggestive examples in order to respond to specific geo-historical situations. While this minor cinema cannot represent the whole of Hong Kong cinema, it also highlights the potentialities of Hong Kong cinema that cannot be covered by dominant discourses on Hong Kong. This article focuses upon the films of Fruit Chan. In Fruit Chan’s ‘Hong Kong 1997 Trilogy’, 1997 is neither the beginning of recollections nor the end of Hong Kong. These films dwell upon the failed, the vanished, and the underrepresented to make Hong Kong appear at the intriguing moment of 1997. They explore new perspectives for re-channelling Hong Kong and its histories.
Yau, Shuk-ting Kinnia. “A Study of the Post-Handover Hong Kong Action Cinema, 1997-2007.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 114-30.
Yeung, Jessica Siu-yin. “Cultural Memory, the Trope of ‘Humble Wage Earner,’ and Everyman Heroism in the Hui Brothers’ Comedies and Their Remakes.” Archiv orientální 90, 3 (2022): 417-46.
[Abstract: I attend to the trope of Humble Wage Earners (daa gung zai 打工仔) in the Hui brothers’ comedies and their remake Fantasia (Gwai maa kong soeng kuk 鬼馬狂想曲, 2004) and argue that they preserve a cultural memory of Hong Kong during transitional periods. The trope and its everyman heroism are keys to decoding the social critique in the remake, which can be seen as an archive constructed through pastiche of canonical elements from the originals. The article first contextualizes the Hui brothers’ comedies in the postwar East Asian comedy film and media tradition (1950s–1970s) and considers them as Hong Kong salaryman comedies, which epitomize the trait of everyman heroism as a core element of Hongkonger’s identity. I demonstrate this point through a reading of Fantasia by focusing on how memory is represented and how the trope is remade. The close reading examines the film’s pastiche of the classic elements, influences, and anecdotes of the Hui brothers’ comedies, hence illustrating a remake’s capacity to archive cultural memory, rewrite cultural history, and reexamine identity in a new light.]
Yip, Man-Fung. “The Difficulty of Difference: Rethinking the Woman Warrior Figure in Hong Kong Martial Arts Cinema.” Chinese Literature Today 3, 1/2 (2013): 82-87.
—–. Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017.
[Abstract: At the core of [the book] 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 urbanindustrial society. This important and popular genre, 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 … that have not been adequately discussed before.]
—–. “The End of an Era: The Cultural Revolution, Modernization, and the Demise of Hong Kong Leftist Cinema.” In Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. NY: Routledge, 2019.
Yue, Audrey. “Preposterous Hong Kong Horror: Rouge‘s (be)hindsight and a (sodomitical) Chinese Ghost Story.” In Ken Gelber, ed., The Horror Reader. NY: Routledge, 2000, 364-73.
Yung, Sai-shing. “Territorialization and the Entertainment Industry of the Shaw Brothers in Southeast Asia.” In Poshek Fu, ed., China Forever: The Shaw Borthers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 133-53.
Zhang, Zhen. “The ‘Shanghai Factor’ in Hong Kong Cinema: A Tale of Two Cities in Historical Perspective.” Asian Cinema 10, 1 (1998): 146-59.
Zhou, Xuelin. “On the Rooftop: A Study of Marginalized Youth Films in Hong Kong Cinema.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 8, 2 (Oct. 2008): 163-78.
—–. Youth Culture in Chinese Language Films. NY: Routledge, 2017.
[Abstract: This book explores the vigorous film cultures of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong from the perspective of youth culture. The book relates this important topic to the wider social, cultural, and institutional context, and discusses the relationship between the films and the changes that today are transforming each society. Among the areas explored are the differences between the three film industries, their creation of new types of screen hero and heroine, and their conflicts with traditional Chinese attitudes such as respect for age. The many films discussed provide fresh perspectives on the ways in which young people are coping with gender, sexuality, class, coming of age, the pressures of education, and major social shifts such as rural to urban migration. They show young adults in each society striving to construct new value systems for a complex, rapidly changing environment.]
Diaspora/Transnational
Bergan-Aurand, Brian. “The Ruined Bodies of Transnational Chinese Cinema.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 27-50.
Bergan-Aurand, Brian, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds. Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015.
[Abstract: This collection of essays on transnational Chinese cinema explores the corporal, psychological, and affective aspects of experiencing bodies on screen; engages with the material and discursive elements of embodiment; and highlights the dynamics between the mind and body involved in bio-cultural practices of cinematic production, distribution, exhibition, and reception.]
Berry, Chris and Mary Farquhar. “From National Cinemas to Cinema and the National: Rethinking the National in Transnational Chinese Cinemas.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 4, 2 (2001): 109-22.
Chan, Kenneth. “The Contemporary Wuxia Revival: Genre Remaking and the Hollywood Transnational Factor.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds.,The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 150-57.
Chang, Hsiao-hung. “The Unbearable Lightness of Globalization: On the Transnational Flight of Wuxia Films.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 95-107.
Ciecko, Anne. “Contemporary Meta-Chinese Film Stardom and Transnational Transmedia Celebrity.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 185-93.
Hee, Wai Siam. “New Immigrant: On the First Locally Produced Film in Singapore and Malaya.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 3 (2014): 244-58.
—–. Remapping the Sinophone The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
[Abstract: In a work that will force scholars to re-evaluate how they approach Sinophone studies, Wai-Siam Hee demonstrates that many of the major issues raised by contemporary Sinophone studies were already hotly debated in the popular culture surrounding Chinese-language films made in Singapore and Malaya during the Cold War. Despite the high political stakes, the feature films, propaganda films, newsreels, documentaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other published materials of the time dealt in sophisticated ways with issues some mistakenly believe are only modern concerns. In the process, the book offers an alternative history to the often taken-for-granted versions of film and national history that sanction anything relating to the Malayan Communist Party during the early period of independence in the region as anti-nationalist. Drawing exhaustively on material from Asian, European, and North American archives, the author does not minimize the complexities produced by British colonialism and anticommunism, identity struggles of the Chinese Malayans, American anti-communism, and transnational Sinophone cultural interactions. Hee shows how Sinophone multilingualism and the role of the local, in addition to other theoretical problems, were both illustrated and practised in Cold War Sinophone cinema.]
Ho, Michelle H. S. “Desiring the Singapore Story: Affective Attachments and National Identities in Anthony Chen’s Llo Llo.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 2 (2015): 173-86.
Jacobs, Katrien. “Drifting Eyeballs: Trans-Asian Feminine Porn Tastes and Experiences.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 225-46.
Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “Imagining Hybrid Cosmopolitan Malaysia through Chinese Kung Fu Comedies: Nasi Lemak 2.0 (2011) and Petaling Street Warriors (2011).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 1 (2014): 57-72.
Lee, Mabel. “Contextualizing Gao Xingjian’s Film Silhouette / Shadow.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (January 2008).
Lee, Yuen Beng. “The Art of Eating in Malaysian Cinema: The Malaysian Sinophone Hunger for National Identity.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 181-200.
Lo, Kwai-Cheung. “The Idea of (Asia)nism and Trans-Asian Productions.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 548-565.
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. [reviewed by David Leiwei Li inJump Cut, no. 47 (Fall 2004).
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.
Mai, Xin’en 麥欣恩. Xianggang dianying yu Xinjiapo: Lengzhan shidai XingGang wenhua lianji, 1950-65 香港電影與新加坡冷戰時代星港文化連擊, 1950-65 (Hong Kong Cinema and Singapore: a cultural ring between two cities, 1950-1965). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
Marchetti, Gina. From Tiananmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006.
—–. “Cinemas of the Chinese Diaspora.” In Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book. London: BFI, 2011, 26-34.
Poon, Erika Ka-yan. “Southeast Asian Film Festival: The Site of the Cold War Cultural Struggle.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 1 (2019): 76-92.
[Abstract: Southeast Asian Film Festival (AFF), which commenced in 1954, was an annual event co-organized by Japanese and Southeast Asian film industries including Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines during the Cold War. Japanese film studio Daiei initiated AFF. Attempts to study AFF focus on the initiator, that is, Japanese cinema. This article contributes to the current scholarship by adding the participant, Hong Kong cinema. It examines the tensions at AFF between Hong Kong and Japanese cinema and further investigates the co-produced film between the two cinemas facilitated by AFF, Yang Kwei-Fei (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1955). The article conceptualizes AFF and the co-production as a site of cultural struggle. Japanese cinema’s attempts to maintain its hegemony in Asia and Hong Kong cinema’s pursuit of becoming an equal member of world-class film industries constituted this site of cultural struggle. Japan’s idea of consolidating Asia under its leadership was extended from wartime to AFF. On the other hand, Hong Kong cinema promoted an apolitical view of film but with a hint of nationalism in which the nation was indefinite. It adopted from Japanese cinema the ‘technologizing-centric’ idea: technology was key to defining its production standards and catching up with the West during the Cold War.]
Sze-Lorrain, Fiona, ed. Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian. Paris: Contours, 2007.
[Abstract: this book will contain new and translated essays written by the 2000 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Gao Xingjian and his film collaborators, Alain Melka and Jean-Louis Darmyn, all addressing their film completed in 2005, Silhouette/Shadow (La Silhouette sinon l’ombre). With a preface written by the editor Fiona Sze-Lorrain, this book is the first documentation that focuses exclusively on Gao Xingjian’s artistic expression in the film world.]
Szeto, Kin-Yan. “Jackie Chan’s Cosmopolitical Consciousness and Comic Displacement.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 229-60.
—–. The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.
[Abstract: Kin-Yan Szeto critically examines three of the most internationally famous martial arts film artists to arise out of the Chinese diaspora and travel far from their homelands to find commercial success in the world at large: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan. Positing the idea that these filmmakers’ success is evidence of a “cosmopolitical awareness” arising from their cross-cultural ideological engagements and geopolitical displacements, Szeto demonstrates how this unique perspective allows these three filmmakers to develop and act in the transnational environment of media production, distribution, and consumption…]
Stephen Teo [interviews with Li Yang]. “There is No Sixth Generation: Director Li Yang on Blind Shaft and His Place in Chinese Cinema.” Senses of Cinema27 (July/Aug. 2003).
Tan, See Kam. Hong Kong Cinema and Sinophone Transnationalisms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: explores the intricate complexity of selected films and film-making practices from 1930s Hong Kong (and Shanghai) to the later ‘new wave’ phenomenon of the 1980s. The result is a Sinophone cinema that created some very different ways of understanding ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’, developing their own ‘cosmopolitan dreaming’ within the cultural and economic changes of those times. Exploring sinification and its multiple manifestations in film, the book examines cinematic genres including Huangmei Opera films, qiqing (strange or queer romance) films, fanchuaners (professional cross-sex performers) in film, Hong Kong’s Bond Movies (bangpian), erotic (fengyue) films, and New Wave Hong Kong cinema. In doing so, this book lays fruitful foundations for further understanding the development and changing faces of Hong Kong films and sinophone transnationalism in the even more complex and changing times of today.]
Taylor, Jeremy. Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinema: The Amoy-dialect Film Industry in Postwar Asia. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: The Amoy-dialect film industry thrived in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia in the 1950s. Film in Amoy dialect, a dialect of Chinese, reflects a particular period in the history of the Chinese diaspora, and has been little studied due to its ambiguous place within the wider realm of Chinese and East Asian film history. This book represents the first full length, critical study of the origin, the significant rise and the rapid decline of the Amoy-dialect film industry in post-war Asia. Rather than examining the industry for its own sake, it focuses on its broader cultural, political and economic significance in the region. In particular, it questions many of the assumptions that are currently being made about the ‘recentness’ of transnationalism in Chinese cultural production, as well as the prominence given to ‘the nation’ and ‘nation-building’ in studies of Chinese cinemas and of the Chinese Diaspora. By examining a cinema that was not ‘national’, not grounded in any particular national tradition, and largely unconcerned with the ‘nation-building’ project in post-war Asia, this book challenges the very terms of reference within which many studies of film have been conducted.]
Teo, Miaw Lee. “Interstitial Filmmaking, Spatial Displacement and Quasi-family Ties in Postcards from the Zoo (2012).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 15, 1 (March 2021): 56-72.
[Abstract: This article examines Chinese Indonesian filmmaker, Edwin’s feature film, Postcards from the Zoo (2012). The lifting of the media regulations and the resurgence of Chinese identity in the reformasi era, a period after the downfall of Suharto’s government (1966–1998), transformed the filmmaking scene in Indonesia. A young Chinese Indonesian filmmaker, Edwin emerged to take part in independent filmmaking. This article takes into consideration the filmmaker’s ethnic Chinese background and the complexity of his hybrid identity and sense of in-betweenness, which plays an important role in structuring his cinematic practice. Through a close textual analysis of the film, the article interrogates the questions of spatial displacement and the potential of forging quasi-family ties that are not based on ethnic or racial identity. The discussion also focuses on the interstitial mode of production that evidenced through the multiple funding sources received by the film and the various roles the filmmaker plays in the productions. The film, Postcards from the Zoo (2012) shows Edwin works within an interstitial mode of production and, more specifically, the adoption of, what Hamid Naficy has called, “chronotopes of imagined homeland”. This article provides a more in-depth examination of the concept in an attempt to analyse the notion of spatial displacement and interstitiality in Edwin’s filmmaking.]
Tsai, Eva. “Kaneshiro Takeshi: Transnational Stardom and the Media and Culture Industries in Asia’s Global/Postcolonial Age.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005): 100-32.
Wang, Yiman. “The Phantom Strikes Back: Triangulating Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21 (2004): 317-26.
—–. “Anna May Wong: A Border-crossing ‘Minor’ Star Mediating Performance.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 2 (2008): 91-102.
—–. “The ‘Transnational’ as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and its Chinese Remakes.”Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, 1 (May 2008): 9-22.
[Abstract: This essay critiques unreflective celebration of transnational Chinese cinema and proposes the ‘transnational’ as methodology. By examining the dual modes of address in a Hong Kong remake of a Lubitsch musical comedy, I demonstrate the importance of scrutinizing border politics and the ‘foreignization’ of Chinese cinema in its transnational production and reception.]
—–. “Made in China, Sold in the United States, and Vice Versa–Transnational ‘Chinese’ Cinema between Media Capitals.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 2 (June. 2009): 163-76.
—–. “Alter-centering Chinese Cinema: The Diasporic Formation.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 535-51.
Xu, Lanjun. “Contested Chineseness and Third Sister Liu in Singapore and Hong: Songs, Landscape, and Cold War Politics in Asia.” In Poshek Fu and Man-Fung Yip, eds., The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. NY: Routledge, 2019.
Xu Weixian 許維賢. Chonghui Huayu yuxi bantu: Lengzhan qianhou XinMa Huayu dianying de wenhua shengchan 重繪華語語系版圖 冷戰前後新馬華語電影的文化生產 (Remapping the Sinophone: the cultural production of Chinese-language cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
Zubillaga-Pow, Jun. “Trans-mothering on Singapore’s Siniticate Screens.” In Brian Berergan-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Wai Siam Hee, eds., Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure. Transactions, 2015, 95-112.