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An in-depth exploration of the stardom and authorship of Stephen Chow Sing-chi, one of Hong Kong cinema's most enduringly popular stars and among its most commercially successful directors. In the West, Stephen Chow is renowned as the ground-breaking director and star of global blockbusters such as
Kung Fu Hustle (2004) and
Shaolin Soccer (2001). Among Hong Kong audiences, Chow is celebrated as the leading purveyor of local comedy, popularising the so-called
mo-lei-tau ("gibberish") brand of Cantonese vernacular humour, and cultivating a style of madcap comedy that often masks a trenchant social commentary.
This volume approaches Chow from a diverse range of critical perspectives. Each of the essays, written by a host of renowned international scholars, offers compelling new interpretations of familiar hits such as
From Beijing with Love (1994) and
Journey to the West (2013). The detailed case studies of seminal local and global movies provide overdue critical attention to Chow's filmmaking, highlighting the aesthetic power, economic significance, and cultural impact of his films in both domestic and global markets.
About the author
Gary Bettinson is Senior Lecturer in film studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai (2015), co-editor (with James Udden) of The Poetics of Chinese Cinema (2016) and (with Daniel Martin) Hong Kong Horror Cinema (2018), and chief editor of the Asian Cinema journal.Mark Gallagher is co-editor, with Yiman Wang, of Bloomsbury's Global East Asian Screen Cultures series and co-editor, with Chi-Yun Shin, of East Asian Film Noir (2015). He is the author of Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (2018), Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (2013) and Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives (2006).Gary Bettinson is Senior Lecturer in film studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai (2015), co-editor (with James Udden) of The Poetics of Chinese Cinema (2016) and (with Daniel Martin) Hong Kong Horror Cinema (2018), and chief editor of the Asian Cinema journal.Vivian P.Y. Lee is the author of The Other Side of Glamour: The Left-wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond (2020) and The Post-Nostalgic Imagination: Hong Kong Cinema since 1997 (2009), and editor of East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations (2011).Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013). She is a NEH (National Endowment for
Humanities) awardee in 2019-20. She has guest edited a special issue for Feminist Media Histories on Asian feminist media (2019), and has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on the topics of Chinese cinema studies, independent documentary, star studies, ecocinema, race gender and early cinema, film remakes and adaptation.
Vivian P.Y. Lee is the author of The Other Side of Glamour: The Left-wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond (2020) and The Post-Nostalgic Imagination: Hong Kong Cinema since 1997 (2009), and editor of East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations (2011).
