World Film Locations: Hong Kong

Author: Linda Chiu-Han Lai
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783201053
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
The rapid development of Hong Kong has occasioned the demolition of buildings and landscapes of historic significance, but film acts as a repository for memories of lost places, vanished vistas and material objects. Location shoots in Hong Kong have preserved many disappearing landmarks of the city, and the resulting films function as valuable and irreplaceable archives of the city’s evolution. Far more than a simple collection of movie locations, this book delivers a rare glimpse into the history of film production practices in Hong Kong. The locations described here are often not the most iconic; rather, they are the anonymous streets and back alleys used by local film studios in the 1960s and 70s. They are the garden cafes with outdoor seating near the Chinese University of Hong Kong where moments of conflict in romantic comedies erupt and dissipate. They are the old Kai Tak Airport, which channels rage and desire, and the tenement housing, which splits citizens into greedy landlords and the diligent working class and embodies old-day communal values. Modern Hong Kong horror films draw their power from the material character of home-grown convenient stores, shopping arcades and lost mansions found under modern high rises. As in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To, readers will drift and dash through the streets of Central to the district’s periphery, almost recklessly, automatically, or for the sheer pleasure of roaming. The first of its kind in English, this book is more than a city guide to Hong Kong through the medium of film; it is a unique exploration of relationship between location and place and genre innovations in Hong Kong cinema.

World Film Locations: Florence

Author: Alberto Zambenedetti
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783203447
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
Florence, with its rich history, privileged place in the canon of Western art, and long-standing relationship with the moving image, is a cinematic city equal to Venice or Rome. World Film Locations: Florence explores the city as it is manifested in the minds of filmmakers and filmgoers. Contributors to the collection consider a wide range of topics, including the tourist’s perception of Florence, representations of art and artists on screen, the camera-friendly Tuscan countryside and mouthwatering local cuisine and filmic adaptations of canonical Italian literature. Through scene reviews of films, including Bobby Deerfield, A Room with a View, Tea with Mussolini and Under the Tuscan Sun, World Film Locations: Florence delves deeper into the makeup of the city, looking at both familiar and unfamiliar locations through the lens of such filmmakers as Roberto Rossellini, Mario Monicelli, Brian DePalma and Ridley Scott.

World Film Locations: São Paulo

Author: Natalia Pinazza
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783201150
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
São Paulo is the largest city in South America and the powerhouse of Brazil’s economy. A multi-racial metropolis with a diverse population of Asian, Arabic and European immigrants as well as migrants from other parts of Brazil, it is a global city with international reach. Films set in São Paulo often replace the postcard images of beautiful tropical beaches and laid-back lifestyles with working environments and the search for better opportunities. Bikinis and flip flops give way to urban subcultures, sport, entertainment and artistic movements. The ability to transcend national boundaries, and its resistance to stereotypical images of an 'exotic' Brazil, make São Paulo a fascinating location in which to explore Brazil’s changing economic and cultural landscapes.

World Film Locations: Shanghai

Author: John Berra
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783202718
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
Celebrating Shanghai’s rich cinematic history, the films covered here represent a lengthy time period, from the first Golden Age of Chinese Cinema in the 1930s to the city’s status as an international production hub in 2013. Given the enduring status of Shanghai as the 'Paris of the East,' World Film Locations: Shanghai emphasizes the city’s cosmopolitan glamour through locations that are steeped in cinematic exoticism, while also probing the reality behind the image by investigating its backstreets and residential zones. To facilitate this study of Shanghai’s dual identity through reference to film locations, the book includes films from both the commercial and independent sectors, with a balance between images captured by local filmmakers and the visions of Western directors who have also utilized the city for their projects. With numerous essays that reflect Shanghai’s relationship to film and scene reviews of such iconic titles as Street Angel, Temptress Moon, Kung Fu Hustle, and Skyfall, World Film Locations: Shanghai is essential reading for all scholars of China’s urban culture.

World Film Locations: Singapore

Author: Duncan Petrie
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783203463
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
A vibrant city and country nestled at the foot of the Malaysian peninsula, Singapore has long been a crossroads, a stopping point and a cultural hub where goods, inventions and ideas are shared and traded. Though Singapore was home to a flourishing Chinese and Malay film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, between independence in 1965 and the early 1990s, few movies were made in Singapore. A new era for cinema in the sovereign city-state started with the international recognition of Eric Khoo’s first features, followed by a New Wave comprised of graduates from local film schools. In recent years the Singapore film industry has produced commercially successful fare, such as the horror movie The Maid, as well as more artistic films like Sandcastle, the first Singaporean film to be selected for International Critic’s Week at Cannes and Ilo Ilo, which won the Caméra d’or at Cannes in 2013. Covering the myths that surround Singaporean film and exploring the realities of the movies that come from this exciting city, World Film Locations: Singapore introduces armchair travellers to a rich, but less known, national cinema

World Film Locations

Author: Linda Chiu-Han Lai
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
ISBN: 9781783200214
Category : Motion picture locations
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The rapid development of Hong Kong has occasioned the demolition of buildings and landscapes of historic significance, but film acts as a repository for memories of lost places, vanished vistas, and material objects. Location shoots in Hong Kong have preserved many disappearing landmarks of the city, and the resulting films function as valuable and irreplaceable archives of the city's evolution. Far more than a simple collection of movie locations, this book delivers a rare glimpse into the history of film production practices in Hong Kong. The locations described here are often not the most iconic; rather, they are the anonymous streets and back alleys used by local film studios in the 1960s and 70. They are the garden cafes with outdoor seating near the Chinese University of Hong Kong where moments of conflict in romantic comedies erupt and dissipate. They are the old Kai Tak Airport, which channels rage and desire, and the tenement housing, which splits citizens into greedy landlords and the diligent working class and embodies old-day communal values. Modern Hong Kong horror films draw their power from the material character of home-grown convenient stores, shopping arcades, and lost mansions found under modern high rises. As in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To, readers will drift and dash through the streets of Central to the district's periphery, almost recklessly, automatically, or for the sheer pleasure of roaming. The first of its kind in English, this book is more than a city guide to Hong Kong through the medium of film; it is a unique exploration of relationship between location and place and genre innovations in Hong Kong cinema.

At Full Speed

Author: Ching-Mei Esther Yau
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816632350
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Breathtaking swordplay and nostalgic love, Peking opera and Chow Yun-fat's cult followers -- these are some of the elements of the vivid and diverse urban imagination that find form and expression in the thriving Hong Kong cinema. All receive their due in At Full Speed, a volume that captures the remarkable range and energy of a cinema that borrows, invents, and reinvents across the boundaries of time, culture, and conventions. At Full Speed gathers film scholars and critics from around the globe to convey the transnational, multilayered character that Hong Kong films acquire and impart as they circulate worldwide. These writers scrutinize the films they find captivating: from the lesser known works of Law Man and Yuen Woo Ping to such film festival notables as Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai, and from the commercial action, romance, and comedy genres of Jackie Chan, Peter Chan, Steven Chiau, Tsui Hark, John Woo, and Derek Yee to the attempted departures of Evans Chan, Ann Hui, and Clara Law. In this cinema the contributors identify an aesthetics of action, gender-flexible melodramatic excesses, objects of nostalgia, and globally projected local history and identities, as well as an active critical film community. Their work, the most incisive account ever given of one of the world's largest film industries, brings the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong cinema into clear close-up focus even as it enlarges on the relationships between art and the market, cultural theory and the movies.

World Film Locations: Toronto

Author: Tom Ue
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783202874
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
Toronto is a changing city that has been a source of reflection and inspiration to writers and artists whose work focuses on the conditions and prospects of human life. A city on the move, it demands policies and regulation, and it offers the pleasures and perils of the massive and the anonymous. As a site of study, the city is inherently multidisciplinary, with natural ties to history, geography, sociology, architecture, art history, literature and many other fields. World Film Locations: Toronto explores and reveals the relationship between the city and cinema using a predominately visual approach. The juxtaposition of the images used in combination with insightful essays helps to demonstrate the role that the city has played in a number of hit films, including Cinderella Man, American Psycho and X-Men and encourages the reader to frame an understanding of Toronto and the world around us. The contributors trace Toronto’s emergence as an international city and demonstrate the narrative interests that it has continued to inspire among filmmakers, both Canadian and international. With support from experts in Canadian studies, the book’s selection of films successfully shows the many facets of Toronto and also provides insider’s access to a number of sites that are often left out of scholarship on Toronto in films, such as the Toronto International Film Festival. The 2014 release of this attractive volume will be a particularly welcome addition to the international celebrations of the city’s 180th anniversary.

World Film Locations: Athens

Author: Anna Poupou
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783203420
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
A filmic guidebook of the Greek capital, World Film Locations: Athens takes readers to film locations in the central historical district with excursions to the periphery of Athens – popular neighbourhoods, poor suburbs and slums often represented in postwar neorealist films – and then on to garden cities and upper class suburbs, especially those preferred by the auteurs of the 1970s. Of course, no Grecian vacation would be complete without a visit to the sea, and summer resorts, hotels and beaches near Athens are frequent backdrops for international productions. However, more recent economic strife has emptied city neighbourhoods, created urban violence and caused an increase in riots in the Mediterranean city, and representations of this on film are juxtaposed with images of the eternal and idyllic city. Featuring both Greek and foreign productions from various genres and historical periods, World Film Locations: Athens ultimately works to establish connections between the various aesthetics of dominant representations of Athens.

World Film Locations: Beijing

Author: John Berra
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 184150677X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
In a series of spotlight essays and illustrated scene reviews, a cast of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices explore the vast range of films – encompassing drama, madcap comedy, martial arts escapism and magical realism – that have been set in Beijing. Unveiling a city of hidden courtyards, looming skyscrapers and traditional Hutong neighbourhoods, these contributors depict a distinctive urban culture that reflects the conflict and tumult of a nation in transition. With considerations of everything from the back streets of Beijing Bicycle to the forbidden palace of The Last Emperor to the tourist park of The World, this volume is a definitive cinematic guide to an ever-changing and endlessly fascinating capital city.