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Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation

Online ISBN:
9789888390397
Print ISBN:
9789888390717
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
Book

Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation

Man-Fung Yip
Man-Fung Yip
The University of Oklahoma
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Published online:
21 September 2017
Published in print:
1 July 2017
Online ISBN:
9789888390397
Print ISBN:
9789888390717
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press

Abstract

The martial arts film, despite being long regarded as a vehicle of Chinese cultural nationalism, can also paradoxically be conceptualized as a mass cultural expression of Hong Kong’s colonial-capitalist modernity. Moving beyond generalized notions of martial arts cinema’s appeal, this book argues that the important and popular genre 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 an original 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—not just the canonical works of King Hu, Chang Cheh, and Bruce Lee, but many lesser-known ones by Lau Kar-leung and Chor Yuen, among others.

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