The transnational history and cultural politics of the Shaw Brothers' movie empire

This book marks the 10th anniversary of the Routledge journal Transnational Screens. Written by leading scholars, this book looks at the key developments in the field of transnational film and screen studies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Transnational Screens.

This book examines the main issues and concepts relating to heritage, screen and literary tourism (HSLT) and provides a comprehensive understanding and evaluation of these three forms of tourism in the context of global tourism development. It analyses the demand and supply of HSLT within the frameworks provided by service-dominant logic and value creation to enable a critical perspective on how HSLT tourist experiences are created, produced and shaped. The volume explores the challenges which relate to the role of the consumer in the co-creation of the tourist experience, and the implications this has for the development, marketing, interpretation, consumption, planning and management of HSLT. It will appeal to researchers and students of heritage tourism, film and literary tourism, media-driven tourism, tourism planning and destination development and management.

This introductory volume presents an overview of the philosophy of film, a burgeoning sub-discipline of Aesthetics. It offers a sampling of paradigmatic instances of philosophers and philosophical film theorists discussing the movies in a fashion that takes cinema as seriously as any other Fine Art, leaving little doubt that doing philosophy of film is a serious intellectual enterprise.

Postwar Hong Kong cinema played an active role in building the colony’s community in the 1950s and 1960s. To Jing Jing Chang, the screening of movies in postwar Hong Kong was a process of showing the filmmakers’ visions for Hong Kong society and simultaneously an attempt to conceal their anxieties and mask their political agenda. It was a time when the city was a site of intense ideological struggles among the colonial government, Chinese Nationalists, and Communist sympathizers. The medium of film was recognized as a powerful tool for public persuasion and various camps competed to win over the hearts and minds of the audience. Screening Communities thus situates the history of postwar Hong Kong cinema at the intersection of Cold War politics, Chinese culture, and local society. Focusing on the genres of official documentary film, leftist family melodrama (lunlipian), and youth film, this study examines the triangulated relationship of colonial interventions in Hong Kong film culture, the rise of left-leaning Cantonese directors as new cultural elites, and the positioning of audiences as contributors to the colony’s journey toward industrial modernity. Filmmakers are shown having to constantly negotiate changing sociopolitical conditions: the Hong Kong government presenting itself as a collaborative ruling body, moral and didactic messages being adapted for commercial releases, and women becoming recognized as a driving force behind Hong Kong’s postwar industrial success. In putting forward a historical narrative that privileges the poetics and politics of shaping a local community through a continuous screening process, Screening Communities offers a new interpretation of the development of Hong Kong cinema—one that breaks away from the usual accounts of the “rise and fall” of the industry. “Despite the voluminous literature on Hong Kong cinema, Screening Communities doesn’t just fill in gaps; it positively seals up a number of fissures. Chang shows us a cinema on the ground, refuting the standard image of an apolitical, fantasized world of martial arts and musicals. When Hong Kong’s identity seems ever more precarious, this is a bracing reminder of how film was deeply implicated in Hong Kong identity-formation in the Cold War era.” —David Desser, University of Illinois “Screening Communities offers an exciting analysis of the role of cinemas in shaping Hong Kong and diasporic identities during the Cold War. Chang brings left-wing Cantonese filmmakers and the colonial state back into the story, and in the process broadens our understanding of the place of Hong Kong in the cultural and social history of the Cold War. This is an important contribution to the scholarship.” —Jeremy E. Taylor, University of Nottingham

This edition of A History of Shakespeare on Screen updates the chronology to 2003, with a new chapter on recent films.