The Cinema of Stephen Chow: (Global East Asian Screen Cultures)

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.

Introduction - Gary Bettinson and Vivian P. Y. Lee (Lancaster University, UK)

I: Stephen Chow and the Hong Kong Television and Film Industries
1. Stephen Chow and the Hong Kong Film Industry of the 1990s-Early 2000s - Ruby Cheung (University of Southampton, UK)
2. From Sing Kid to Master Sing: Stephen Chow and Labor Management in the Hong Kong and Mainland Film Industry - Lin Feng (University of Leicester, UK)
3. King of Hong Kong Comedy: The Making of the “Stephen Chow Film” - Vivian P. Y. Lee

II: Auteurism, Visuality and Genre
4. Stephen Chow, King of Comedy Auteurs - Stephen Teo (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
5. Stephen Chow’s Visual Comedy - Gary Bettinson
6. Spy Films with Clumsy Spies: Stephen Chow’s Response to the James Bond Craze - Jessica Siu-yin Yeung (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)

III: The Bruce Lee Connection: Re-making the Comic Kung Fu Hero
7. Descendant of the Dragon: Stephen Chow, Postmodernism, and the Legacy of Bruce Lee - Kyle Barrowman (DePaul University, USA)
8. Way of the Intercepting Pun: Language and the Body in Stephen Chow’s Carnival of Kung Fu - Luke White (Middlesex University, UK)
9. “Bruce Lee is My Idol”: Kung Fu Comedy, Nonsense, and Nostalgia - Wayne Wong (University of Sheffield, UK)

IV: Performing the Comic in the (Post)colonial, Postsocialist Era
10. Precarious Lives through Stephen Chow’s Comic Lens: Speculation, Caricature and Precariat - Enoch Tam (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)
11. Stephen Chow’s Trickster: An Elasticity of Mind and Body - Tom Cunliffe (University College London, UK)
12. The Myth of Resilience in Stephen Chow’s Post-CEPA Films: Kung Fu Hustle and The New King of Comedy - Jing Yang (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China)

Bibliography
Index

Gary Bettinson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai (2015). He is co-editor (with James Udden) of The Poetics of Chinese Cinema (2016), and (with Daniel Martin) of Hong Kong Horror Cinema (2018). He is chief editor of the journal Asian Cinema.

Vivian P.Y. Lee is Associate Professor of Chinese and History at City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is 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 Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: the Post-nostalgic Imagination (2009). She is editor of East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations (2011).