Related Papers
What can a gwei por do?? Cynthia Rothrock's Hong Kong career
Meaghan Morris
Cynthia Rothrock is a martial arts performance legend of the 1980s who began acting in Hong Kong cinema in the late 1980s and became a transnational video star in the 1990s. At the height of her fame she was mobbed by fans from Germany to Indonesia and she made a stadium erupt in the USA, where her thirty-odd films were not shown in cinemas; the subject of hundreds of media articles worldwide, she has been the object of adoring fan web-sites and ‘shrines’, and features today in lovingly curated YouTube galleries of her best fight scenes. Yet in academic studies her work in Hong Kong is praised but rarely discussed, while her career is often framed as one of failure to become a ‘real’ star—that is, to get a big screen role in Hollywood. This article explores some of the reasons for the difficulty we have in accounting for an American performer's contribution to Asian popular culture, asking how critical questions might be reframed to take better account of Rothrock's Asian work.
Gender, Identity and Influence: Hong Kong Martial Arts Films
2002 •
Gilbert Castillo
Novos Olhares
Shanghai gangster films and the politics of change
Tatu Laukkanen
In this paper through a very close textual reading I will show the ideological differences between two films based on the life of Shanghai gangster Du Yuesheng (1888, Pudong – 1951, Hong Kong) through close formal and narrative analysis. Du was already a celebrity in his day in the Republican era and is still a con-troversial figure in Greater China. However, there are only two films based on the life of the French Con-cession opium kingpin, the recent Hong Kong/PRC co-production The Last Tycoon (Da Shang Hai, Wong Jing, 2012) and the epic two part Lord of the East China Sea I & II (Shang Hai huang di zhi: Sui yue feng yun & Shang Hai huang di zhi: Xiong ba tia xia, Hong Kong, Poon Man-kit 1993). I show how these films reflect HK's and China's politico-economic changes focusing on the representation of social class and the subject, depiction of internal migration and immigration, and nationalism. The films will be discussed in their relation to changes in the Hong Kong film...
Asian Cinema
King Hu in Hollywood: Making the Battle of Ono
2018 •
George Chun Han Wang
The Battle of Ono was supposed to be King Hu’s American feature debut. But after more than two decades of devoted efforts to develop and finance this ambitious project, King Hu suddenly passed away before principal photography could begin. Now, more than twenty years since his death, there exists no in-depth documentations nor comprehensive studies of the great Chinese director’s unfulfilled Hollywood experience. To patch a long void in our knowledge of King Hu’s late-career activities and struggles in Hollywood, this article chronicles the development of The Battle of Ono and King Hu’s dauntless navigations through the American film industry, and examines the significant challenges and incidents King Hu had faced in his pioneer- ing yet futile efforts to conquer Hollywood.
Social Semiotics
An equivocal space for the protestant ethnic: US popular culture and martial arts fantasia
2010 •
Keiko Nitta
This article intends to undo the commodity status of several martial arts films produced in Hollywood and their pretence of ethnic recognition in terms of Rey Chow's concept of “the protestant ethnic”. In The protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism, Chow demonstrates how the present-day ethnos materialize themselves through protests. How have martial arts functioned as a noticeable apparatus for both this protest and capitalist interpellation? I will investigate a particular sociopolitical backdrop that conveniently approved martial arts as an ethno-cultural expression. The first half of the article is devoted to explicating the cultural work of Bruce Lee, a “protestant” in Chow's sense. He has constructed a space in which an Asian version of morality, authority, and supremacy can maintain an existence in a particular form intertwined with a sense of ethnic masculinity. The latter half interprets one of the later works that blatantly reshaped the significance of the martial arts film in accordance with a more obvious combination of commercial and security interests of the United States: the Karate Kid series produced through the 1980s. A close reading of the series shows how martial arts films necessarily require the concept of man, as embodied by the human commodity and ambiguous Asian manhood, as a strange but useful mimetic category of its definition of human beings.
Cultural Studies Review
Burst Into Action: The Changing Spectacle of Glamour Heroines in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema
2013 •
ching-kiu stephen CHAN
My question for now is: in what ways have the new currents of transnationality affected existing forms of cultural sensibility in the ‘post-colony’? Realised as a system of representation of the global popular, recent articulations of popular experience tend to be absorbed into generic cross-cultural media representations shared on the glocal level of operation by cultural producers, consumers and practitioners across geographical borders. In this paper, I shall focus on the changing spectacle of ‘the local’ through its cinematic action (along with its alternative heroine mediation), in light of such a transnational articulation as the emerging dominant. My purpose is to examine how local action has been re-imagined and can be re-aligned in relation to the specifically historical, national and postcolonial mode of imagination under the contemporary glocal context of the Hong Kong ‘Special Administrative Region’ (HKSAR), as this particular post-colony is officially renamed.
International Journal of Cultural Policy
Policy and creative strategies: Hong Kong CEPA films in the China market
Shi-Yan Chao, Emilie Yeh
The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance - Chapter 1
Gary Bettinson
Entertext
“Martial Arts North and South: Liu Jialiang’s Vision of Hung Gar in Shaw Brothers Films,” EnterText 6.1 (Autumn 2006), pp. 74-110, http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~acsrrrm/entertext/6_1/ET61Wux3MarchettiED.doc
2006 •
Gina Marchetti
In Fung, A (Ed). Made in Hong Kong. Studies in Popular Music(33-43). London, New York: Routledge.
Pax Musica and Mnets Cantopop-Kpop Convergences and Inter-Asia Cultural Mobilities
2020 •
Liew Kai Khiun, Meicheng Sun
Hong Kong and South Korea’s edge in the entertainment industries in recent decades have projected the otherwise historically peripheral territories significantly more visible regional and global presence. Along with film and television, popular music, namely Hong Kong’s Cantopop and Korean pop (Kpop) have gained transnational popularity, a trend that points evidently to the regional circulation of regional Asian popular entertainment along the popular culture nodal points along Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong. Cantopop’s regional ascendency came separately in the 1970s, two decades before K-pop. Its popularity has now been eclipsed by its Korean counterpart. Nonetheless, instead of narratives of “rise and fall” and asymmetrical “sender and recipient” relations within the boundaries of “national music” of the nation-state, Cantopop-Kpop interactions entails a more sustained history of intercultural referencing and collaborations as well as nostalgic retrospections. Such activities constitutes the fluid cosmopolitan transnationality of Inter-Asia Pop Culture mobilities.
