Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films: Police Procedural Colludes with Supernatural-Martial Arts Cinema

Author(s):  
Kenneth Chan

Through a close analysis of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), this chapter argues that the film’s successful appeal to local and global Chinese audiences is based on a conservative reading of the familiar cultural trope of modernity versus tradition, as mirrored in the supposed tensions between the police procedural and the horror/supernatural elements in the wuxia shenguai genre. These tensions are problematic precisely because their narrative and rhetorical purpose is to shore up the deterministic logic of Chinese cultural history, the interpellative call of Chinese political power, and the cultural nationalist logic of being Chinese. However, the film is also capable to generating counter-readings of its politics by recasting itself as a global cinematic text of political irony and oppositional resistance.

Author(s):  
Man-Fung Yip

This chapter considers how the (male) action bodies in martial arts cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, posed between mastery and vulnerability, served as a site/sight through which the aspirations and anxieties of Hong Kong people living in the flux of a rapidly modernizing society were articulated and made visible. Specifically, it identifies three types of action body—the narcissistic body, the sacrificial body, and the ascetic body—and discusses how each crystallized out of the changing social and ideological dynamics of Hong Kong during the period. As socially symbolic signs, these diverse but interrelated representations of the body are extremely rich in meanings, inscribing within themselves not only fantasies of nationalist pride and liberated labor but also the historical experience of violence, in the form of both colonization and unbridled growth, that lay beneath the transformation of Hong Kong into a modern industrial society.


Author(s):  
Man-Fung Yip

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Dhruba Karki

 Zhang Yimou’s Hero presents an action hero, yet in a slightly different cinematic mode than that of Stephen Chow-directed Shaolin Soccer to blend myth and modernity. In Yimou’s martial arts cinema, Jet Li-starred Nameless hero uses martial arts to combat the king’s adversaries, including Donnie Yen-starred Long Sky, Maggie Cheung-starred Flying Snow and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai-starred Broken Sword in the service to the Qin Dynasty (221 BC – 207 BC). The warrior hero’s indigenous body art helps the Qin Dynasty transform the smaller warring kingdoms into a powerful Chinese Empire, a strong foundation of modern China with economic and military superpower. Like their western counterparts, including T1000 and Neo, the Hong Kong action heroes, such as the warrior hero and the Qin King have been refashioned in the Hollywood controlled twentieth-century popular culture. Different from their Hollywood counterparts in actions, the Hong Kong action heroes in Hero primarily use their trained bodies and martial skills to promote the Chinese civilization, an adaptation of the Hollywood tradition of technologized machine body. Reworking of myth and archetype in Nameless’s service to the Qin Dynasty and the emperor’s mission to incept the Chinese Empire, the Hong Kong action heroes appear on screen, a blend of tradition and modernity. The film industry’s projection of the Chinese history with the legendary action heroes, including Nameless soldier and the Qin King globalizes the indigenous Chinese culture by using modern electronic digital technology, a resonance of the western technological advancement.


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
SVEND ERIK LARSEN

Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has established itself as a specific European construct, with the 18th century as its final breakthrough in practical and ideological terms. A close analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing the Vitruvian Man, in statu nascendi, shows how the individual human being carrying the obligations and the promises of this history, is envisioned. The final remarks underline the importance of scientific knowledge in the concrete shaping of this responsibility and a plea for an increased cooperation across the disciplines.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (12) ◽  
pp. 1454-1473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Hernández

A frame analysis was conducted on a Hong Kong newspaper to determine whether news coverage of female fatalities at the hands of their intimate partners was reported in conventional domestic violence ways or if there were culture-specific explanations. Overall, most coverage supported known views of domestic violence, justifying the perpetrator and categorizing the issue as isolated crime. However, a few stories highlighted the historical subordination of women under patriarchy in Confucianism as an important cultural factor. Findings have implications for the lack of generalization of the social problem, and the understanding of cultural and political power in Hong Kong society.


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