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Remaking Chinese Cinema
Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood
by Yiman Wang
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Book Presentation:
From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point--Shanghai in the Chinese case--she argues for a multi-local process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through trans-regional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema.
Among the book's highlights are a rereading of The Goddess--one of the best-known silent Chinese films in the West--from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood's fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood's remake of Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of "Chinese elements" in Kung Fu Panda 2.
Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalization. As such, Remaking Chinese Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.
Press Reviews:
Wang’s intervention in the study of cross-boarder adaptation and remake is undoubtedly groundbreaking. For both specialists and non-specialists, for film scholars and filmmakers alike, it offers an exceptionally judicious and nuanced understanding of the complexity and multiplicity of the global circulation of our texts and cultural discourses at large. On a deeper theoretical and philosophical level, this book takes a significant step in rethinking the binarized understanding of Hollywood and China as the self and the other, and unpacks the various implications of foreignization and localization in these industries’ long history of cinematic exchanges. Frontiers of Literary Studies in China
See the publisher website: University of Hawaii Press
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