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Arresting Cinema
Surveillance in Hong Kong Film
by Karen Fang
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Book Presentation:
When Ridley Scott envisioned Blade Runner's set as "Hong Kong on a bad day," he nodded to the city's overcrowding as well as its widespread use of surveillance. But while Scott brought Hong Kong and surveillance into the global film repertoire, the city's own cinema has remained outside of the global surveillance discussion.
In Arresting Cinema, Karen Fang delivers a unifying account of Hong Kong cinema that draws upon its renowned crime films and other unique genres to demonstrate Hong Kong's view of surveillance. She argues that Hong Kong's films display a tolerance of—and even opportunism towards—the soft cage of constant observation, unlike the fearful view prevalent in the West. However, many surveillance cinema studies focus solely on European and Hollywood films, discounting other artistic traditions and industrial circumstances. Hong Kong's films show a more crowded, increasingly economically stratified, and postnational world that nevertheless offers an aura of hopeful futurity. Only by exploring Hong Kong surveillance film can we begin to shape a truly global understanding of Hitchcock's "rear window ethics."
About the Author:
Karen Fang is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and a member of the Film Committee for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Press Reviews:
"Hong Kong films love to look: through windows, across courtyards, over ledges, down gun barrels, into mirrors, and around corners. I always knew that, but never gave it much thought until I read Karen Fang's innovative, refreshing, and yes, Arresting Cinema. Fang's analysis offers an essential complement to Western scholarship on cinema and surveillance."—Michael Curtin, University of California, Santa Barbara
"An incisive, insightful consideration of a regional cinema that inspires thinking on a much larger scale. Karen Fang's study of surveillance culture in Hong Kong films offers not only a refreshing perspective on world cinema but also, in tracking how Hong Kong is coming to terms with dramatic changes, a challenge to view the globalized world through a new lens."—Sam Ho, Former Programmer, Hong Kong Film Archive
"Karen Fang's Arresting Cinema breaks new ground in the contemporary surveillance era and makes available to a wider audience a film genre that is relevant well beyond its area focus. As a result, it will be an edifying resource both for area specialists and practitioners and students in diverse disciplines. Conceptually sophisticated yet accessibly written, the book is both timely and of enduring value."—Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
See the publisher website: Stanford University Press
> From the same author:
> On a related topic:
Hong Kong Crime Films (2023)
Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986
Screening Communities (2019)
Negotiating Narratives of Empire, Nation, and the Cold War in Hong Kong Cinema
The Colonial Screen (2025)
Early Cinema in Hong Kong
Experts in Action (2021)
Transnational Hong Kong-Style Stunt Work and Performance
The Other Side of Glamour (2020)
The Left-Wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond
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