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Legacies of the Drunken Master - Politics of the Body in Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,322
Discovery Miles 23 220
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Legacies of the Drunken Master - Politics of the Body in Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films (Hardcover)
Series: Asia Pop!
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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. Legacies of the Drunken Master - the first
book-length analysis of kung fu comedy - interrogates the politics
of the films and their representations of the performing body. It
draws on an interdisciplinary engagement with popular culture and
an interrogation of the critical literature on Hong Kong and
martial arts cinema to offer original readings of key films. These
readings pursue the genre in terms of its carnival aesthetic, the
utopias of the body it envisions, its highly stylized depictions of
violence, its images of masculinity, and the registers of its
"hysterical" laughter. 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.
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