In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema"...

Helen Hok-Sze Leung: Helen Hok-Sze Leung is an Associate Professor in Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, Canada. She has published widely on queer cinema and is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (UBC Press, 2008).

Ashes of Time, by the internationally acclaimed director Wong Kar-wai, has been considered to be one of the most complex and self-reflexive of Hong Kong films. Loosely based on the stories by renowned martial arts novelist Jin Yong, Wong Kar-wai has created a very different kind of martial arts film, which invites close and sustained study.This book presents the nature and significance of Ashes of Time, and the reasons for its being regarded as a landmark in Hong Kong cinema. Placing the f...

Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume’s diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism.Collectiv...

Yellow Music is the first history of the emergence of Chinese popular music and urban media culture in early-twentieth-century China. Andrew F. Jones focuses on the affinities between "yellow” or “pornographic" music—as critics derisively referred to the "decadent" fusion of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms—and the anticolonial mass music that challenged its commercial and ideological dominance. Jones radically revises previous understandings of race, po...

Since the early 1990s, while mainland China’s state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the “Urban Generation,” this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the “Urban Generation” rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Ur...

In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island—with its complex history of colonization—presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a “nation.” While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, in Taiwan, government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of...

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement is a groundbreaking project unveiling recent documentary film work that has transformed visual culture in China, and brought new immediacy along with a broader base of participation to Chinese media. As a foundational text, this volume provides a much-needed introduction to the topic of Chinese documentary film, the signature mode of contemporary Chinese visual culture. These essays examine how documentary filmmakers have opened up a unique new spa...

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. The volume opens with thematic essays on the politics and ethics of writing literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the role of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, the representation of the Chinese diaspora, the rise and meani...

Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, is an excavation of underexposed gender issues focusing mainly on contradictory and troubled feminism in the film narratives. In the cinematic world of martial arts films, one can easily find representations of women of Ancient China released from the constraints of patriarchal social order to revel in a dreamlike space of their own. They can develop themselves, protect themselves, and even defeat or con...

A Better Tomorrow has always been hailed as a milestone in Hong Kong cinema. This book describes the different responses to the movie in Hong Kong and later in its reception worldwide, which paved the way for the promotion of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat to their current prominence in Hollywood. Fang examines the different notions of the genre of action cinema in Asian and Western film industries. She tracks the connections between ying shung pian, or “hero” movie, the term by which Woo’s fil...

In 2007, Ang Lee made an espionage thriller based on the short story "Lust, Caution" by Eileen Chang, China’s most famous female author of the twentieth century. The release of the film became a trigger for heated debates on issues of national identity and political loyalty, and brought unexpectedly harsh criticism from China, where Ang Lee was labelled a traitor in scathing internet critiques, whilst the film's leading actress Tang Wei was banned from appearing on screen for two years.