Verso spring '99 catalogue is at http://www.verso.com
more shameless self-promotion to come, Michael Hoover
CITY ON FIRE: Hong Kong Cinema
MICHAEL HOOVER AND LISA STOKES
Hong Kong's film industry gained global attention in the 1980s, at the time of negotiations over Great Britain's return of the colony to China. Uncertainty about the post-handover era accelerated Hong Kong's race for economic growth, and found expression in cinema's depictions of a "city on fire."
In this accessible introduction to the extraordinary cinematic output of the colony, Michael Hoover and Lisa Stokes review the directors and films that have established Hong Kong cinema internationally: John Woo's martial arts flicks, Tsui Hark's wire-worked fantasies, Ann Hui's exile melodramas, Stanley Kwan's limpid romances, and Wong Kar-wai's stylish art films.
Michael Hoover teaches political science and Lisa Stokes teaches humanities at Seminole Community College in Central Florida.
"A tour-de-force analysis of Hong Kong's film genres, which profiles a city with no time to recover from its own high-speed car chase through late capitalist development." -- Andrew Ross, American Studies, NYU
"Well-researched and documented, City on Fire does a fantastic job of mixing the historical, political, socio-economic factors of Hong Kong and its cinema with critical treatments of film texts and directorial motives and styles." -- John A. Lent, Editor, Asian Cinema
"Informative yet admirably unsnobbish, Hoover and Stokes never lose sight of the movies' rib-sticking goodness. City on Fire is the closest you can get to pre-hand-over Hong Kong without a passport and a time machine." -- Betsy Sherman, film critic for the Boston Globe
Publication April
Paperback 1-85984-203-8 $19US/£13/$26CAN
Hardback 1-85984-716-1 $60US/£40/$85CAN
256 pages 20 b/w photographs
Cinema
Translation rights Verso