Renegotiating Film Genres in East Asian Cinemas and Beyond

This book brings together nine original chapters to examine genre agency in East Asian cinema within the transnational context. It addresses several urgent and pertinent issues such as the distribution and exhibition practices of East Asian genre films, intra-regional creative flow of screen culture, and genre’s creative response to censorship. The volume expands the scholarly discussion of the rich heritage and fast-changing landscape of filmmaking in East Asian cinemas. Confronting the complex interaction between genres, filmic narrative and aesthetics, film history and politics, and cross-cultural translation, this book not only reevaluates genre’s role in film production, distribution, and consumption, but also tackles several under-explored areas in film studies and transnational cinema, such as the history of East Asian commercial cinema, the East Asian film industry, and cross-media and cross-market film dissemination. Acknowledgements Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures Introduction References East Asian Film Genre in a Transnational Age Rapidly Shifting Landscapes: Two Case Studies in the UK Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese Language Films in the Twenty-First Century A Brief History of Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese Language Films in the UK Case Study 1: CRIME: Hong Kong Style Case Study 2: Back to the Multiplex References East Asian Noir: Transnational Film Noir in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong What Is Film Noir? Film Noir in Asia Cinematic Flows Between Japan and Korea Cinematic Flows Between Hong Kong and Korea Conclusion References The Wolf Is Coming: Genre Hybridity in the Contemporary Chinese Blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Chinese Genre Filmmaking Genre Hybridity and the Chinese Blockbuster Further Genre Adventures of the Chinese War Film End Coda: South Korean Cinema and the Rise of a Global Blockbuster References Development of Genre film and Film Genre in East Asia Cinemas Fantasy, Vampirism and Genre/Gender Wars on the Chinese Screen of the Roaring 1920s The Culture of Vampirism in the Roaring 1920s of China Reading the Cave as a Chinese Vampire Film Genre/Gender Wars in the Roaring 1920s Conclusion References Premodern History and the Contemporary South Korean Period Blockbuster The Period Film in Korean Cinema History Representing Premodern History in Postmodern Korea Conclusion References Chinese Censorship, Genre Mediation, and the Puzzle Films of Leste Chen The Great Hypnotist Battle of Memories Conclusion: Certainties Disappear References The Politics of Genre Space Critiquing New Generational Japanese Horror: “Youthful Fatalisms, Old Aesthetics” The History and Development of Ero-guro-nansensu Understanding Ero-guro-nansensu After the Interwar Period Current Contexts and Contemporary Ero-guro-nansensu in Film Conclusion References Genre and Censorship: The Crime Film in Late Colonial Hong Kong Process, Context and Discourse Censorship and Genre in Post-War Hong Kong Political Censorship and the 1988 Film Censorship Ordinance Coda: Category III and the Censors’ Discursive Power References Old Shanghai and Film Noir Cross Over Making Shanghai Noir: Heibang Film as a (Sub-)Genre Interrogating Urbanisation Adventure in a Noir City: The Contemporary Reconstruction of Old Shanghai on the Big Screen Gendering Noir Space: From the Post-colonialist to the Post-socialist Conclusion References Index