Legacies of the Drunken Master
«This brilliant book is a breakthrough in several respects. For Hong Kong cinema and martial arts studies alike it offers the first intellectually serious book-length study in English of kung fu comedy. For cultural studies, author Luke White enlists a supple and sophisticated model that considers social and political contexts across a globally popular entertainment genre that does not easily lend itself to an allegorical reading of stories and themes. For the broad field of cultural theory, the book shows how it is possible to bring a European canon of thought to bear on cultural production in post-colonial contexts beyond the West without hollowing the latter out to demonstrate the interpretive power of the former.»
In 1978 the films Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, both starring a young Jackie Chan, caused a stir in the Hong Kong cinema industry and changed the landscape of martial arts cinema. Mixing virtuoso displays of acrobatic kung fu with knockabout humor to huge box office success, they broke the mold of the tragic and heroic martial arts film and sparked not only a wave of imitations, but also a much longer trend for kung fu comedies that continues to the present day. Les mer
The book's analyses are carried out amidst kung fu comedy's shifting historical contexts, including the aftermath of the 1960s radical youth movements, the rapidly globalizing colonial enclave of Hong Kong and the emerging consciousness of its 1997 handover to China, and the transnationalization of cinema audiences. It argues that through kung fu comedy's images of the body, the genre articulated in complex and often contradictory ways political realities relevant to late twentieth-century Hong Kong and the wider conditions of globalized capitalism. The kung fu comedy entwines us in a popular cultural history that stretches into the folk past and forward into utopian and dystopian possibilities.
Theoretically rich and critical, Legacies of the Drunken Master aims to be at the forefront of scholarship on martial arts cinema. It also addresses readers with a broader interest in Hong Kong culture and politics during the 1970s and 1980s, postcolonialism in East Asia, and action and comedy films in a global context - as well as those fascinated with the performing body in the martial arts.
Detaljer
- Forlag
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Innbinding
- Innbundet
- Språk
- Engelsk
- ISBN
- 9780824881573
- Utgivelsesår
- 2020
- Format
- 23 x 15 cm
Anmeldelser
«This brilliant book is a breakthrough in several respects. For Hong Kong cinema and martial arts studies alike it offers the first intellectually serious book-length study in English of kung fu comedy. For cultural studies, author Luke White enlists a supple and sophisticated model that considers social and political contexts across a globally popular entertainment genre that does not easily lend itself to an allegorical reading of stories and themes. For the broad field of cultural theory, the book shows how it is possible to bring a European canon of thought to bear on cultural production in post-colonial contexts beyond the West without hollowing the latter out to demonstrate the interpretive power of the former.»