Focuses on the cooperation between Hong Kong and Japanese cinema from the Sino-Japanese War, which broke out in the 1930s, up until the early 1970s, to re-evaluate the significance of this event in the context of Asian film history.

Eldridge and Morgan set a new paradigm for East Asian contemporary historiography by viewing the decade of the 1960s as hermeneutically powerful. From street battles over Japan’s security treaty with the United States, to a peace treaty with the former Japanese territory of South Korea, to Japan’s hosting the 1964 Summer Olympics, the 1960s in Japan was a decade of turning points. This book is the first to see the 1960s as a historical subject in its own right and argues that the specificity and internal complexity rooted in East Asia during this period showed how East Asians were dynamic agents in shaping the decade. In this volume, contributors consider Japanese responses to a 1961 coup in the Republic of Korea; the Satō Eisaku administration’s approach to nuclear deterrence and to the question of Okinawa’s return from American control; U.S.-Japan intellectual exchange during the Cold War; support by Japanese businesspeople for the Self-Defense Forces; the “soft power” of Japanese cinema in the 1960s; Japan’s understanding of 1960s United Nations peacekeeping operations; changes in “national polity” discourse in the 1960s; the Dalai Lama’s 1967 visit to Japan; economic development in and cultural exchange between 1960s Japan and Spain; Japan’s science and technology interactions with the United States; and the earliest known, and suspected, cases of North Korean abduction of Japanese citizens. Much of the information in this volume has never appeared in English before. This is an important volume for historians, political scientists, sociologists, and other scholars specializing in the twentieth century and those interested in cutting-edge history-writing about a transformative 10-year period in East Asia.

Examining Hong Kong cinema from its inception in 1913 to the end of the colonial era, this work explains the key areas of production, market, film products and critical traditions. Hong Kong Cinema considers the different political formations of Hong Kong's culture as seen through the cinema, and deals with the historical, political, economic and cultural relations between Hong Kong cinema and other Chinese film industries on the mainland, as well as in Taiwan and South-East Asia. Discussion covers the concept of 'national cinema' in the context of Hong Kong's status as a quasi-nation with strong links to both the 'motherland' (China) and the 'coloniser' (Britain), and also argues that Hong Kong cinema is a national cinema only in an incomplete and ambiguous sense.

This book provides a multifaceted single-volume account of Japanese cinema. It addresses productive debates about what Japanese cinema is, where Japanese cinema is, as well as what and where Japanese cinema studies is, at the so-called period of crisis of national boundary under globalization and the so-called period of crisis of cinema under digitalization.

The trajectory of Hong Kong films had been drastically affected long before the city’s official sovereignty transfer from the British to the Chinese in 1997. The change in course has become more visible in recent years as China has aggressively developed its national film industry and assumed the role of powerhouse in East Asia’s cinematic landscape. The author introduces the “Cinema of Transitions” to study the New Hong Kong Cinema and on- and off-screen life against this background. Using examples from the 1980s to the present, this book offers a fresh perspective on how Hong Kong-related Chinese-language films, filmmakers, audiences, and the workings of film business in East Asia have become major platforms on which “transitions” are negotiated.

This book explores the phenomenon of V-Cinema, founded in Japan in 1989 as a distribution system for direct-to-video movies which film companies began making having failed to recoup their investment in big budget films. It examines how studios and directors worked quickly to capitalize on niche markets or upcoming and current trends, and how as a result this period of history in Japanese cinema was an exceptionally diverse and vibrant film scene. It highlights how, although the V-Cinema industry declined from around 1995, the explosion in quantity and variety of such movies established and cemented many specific genres of Japanese film. Importantly the book argues that film scholars who have long looked down on video as a substandard medium without scholarly interest have been wrong to do so, and that V-Cinema challenges accepted notions of cultural value, providing insight into the formation of cinematic canons and inviting us to rethink what is meant by "Japanese cinema".

This book explores the roles cultural intermediaries play in East Asian cinema. Based on extensive original research, and viewing cinema from the social science perspective which emphasizes the social processes entailed in the cultural production, circulation, and consumption of films and the social relations they involve, rather than studying films as texts, the book examines issues such as the differences between individual and collective intermediaries, the diverse resources and services that they mediate, their social background and targeted audiences, and the political implications of their work. One important conclusion is that cultural intermediaries have been central to creating the whole "idea" of East Asian cinema.