Member shaolin swords Posted February 7, 2011 Member Share Posted February 7, 2011 i just came across this book on barnes and noble just wanted to know if the book is any good how is it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Markgway Posted February 7, 2011 Share Posted February 7, 2011 Never heard of it; but I would be wary of any book that uses an obscure word like diasporic in the title. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member masterofoneinchpunch Posted February 7, 2011 Member Share Posted February 7, 2011 I've mentioned this in a couple of other threads, but I have the only review on Amazon. It is not a short review, but if you have any other questions about the book I can certainly answer them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Markgway Posted February 8, 2011 Share Posted February 8, 2011 "It is far from definitive with a few gargantuan omissions. In the collection of essays it has not one chapter dedicated on either of the two most famous of the Shaw Brothers oeuvre - the Mandarin wuxia and kung fu movies. Poshek Fu missed a golden opportunity with this mistake. This book also completely ignores the exploitation cinema that included such cult hits as Black Magic, Boxer's Omen and Killer Snakes." Pass. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member HAZ Posted February 8, 2011 Member Share Posted February 8, 2011 It's a colection of essays. I do remember there being info on wuxia & all genres. It seemed to have a lot of info about the founding of Shaw Bros, and their position in Singapore, Taiwan & Malaysia. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member masterofoneinchpunch Posted February 8, 2011 Member Share Posted February 8, 2011 very, very little information on wuxia and kung fu. And as I wrote in my review not one chapter dedicated to either. Here are the Chapters: Introduction: The Shaw Brothers Diasporic Cinema 1) Shaw Cinema Enterprise and Understanding Cultural Industries 2) Shaw's Cantonese Productions and Their Interactions with Contemporary Local and Hollywood Cinema 3) Embracing Glocalization and Hong Kong-Made Musical Film 4) Three Readings of Hong Kong Nocturne 5) The Black-and-White Wenyi Films of Shaws 6) Territorialization and the Entertainment Industry of th Shaw Brothers in Southeast Asia 7) The Shaw Brothers' Malay Films 8) Bridging the Pacific with Love Eterne 9) Black Audiences, Blaxploitation and Kung Fu Films, and Challenges to White Celluloid Masculinity 10) Shaw Brothers Cinema and the Hip-Hop Imagination 11) Reminiscences of the Life of an Actress in Shaw Brothers' Movietown by Cheng Pei-pei. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member masterofoneinchpunch Posted February 8, 2011 Member Share Posted February 8, 2011 I actually take my reviews quite seriously. I also like to take notes and quotes out of books I read (especially ones dealing with HK cinema). Here are all the ones I liked: China Forever (2008) Edited by Poshek Fu [shaw Brothers Diasporic Cinema by Poshek Fu] “It was founded in 1925 by four Shaw (in Chinese, Shao) brothers…” [actually it is 1924] “By the 1950s, it developed into what can be called a trans-Asian empire that included theme parks; dance halls; film studios of Chinese and Malay languages; a massive distribution network that importing films from Hong Kong, India, Europe and the United States; and a circuit of more than 130 theaters throughout Southeast Asia.” “…brought Run Run Shaw to Hong Kong in 1957 to reorganize the production facilities.” “Run Run took over the studio (by buying out Runde) and renamed it the Shaw Brothers Studio.” “…the Shaw Brothers st out to build a modern film studio in Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong. In 1965, Movietown boasted fifteen stages, two permanent sets, a color film development facility, and all sorts of state-of-the-art film equipment imported from Europe and the United States.” “The Shaw Brothers had made huge profits from Cantonese films in Southeast Asia; however, from a nationalist perspective it was, after all, a dialect that appealed to a parochial, localized market.” “to bring Chinese-language cinema to a worldwide audience, the Shaw Brothers Studio adopted Mandarin as its business language.” “At the height of its power from 1960 to 1973, the studio was also successful in building what can be called a trans-Asian entertainment network, with movements of capital, technology, and personnel across the Asian region, a success that led to the later transformation of Hong Kong into the capital of the regional cinemas.” “Aside from learning up close the Western production procedures, he made profits out of such deals by acquiring their exclusive distribution rights to these films in Asia and rights to use their sets and original scripts for his Mandarin-language productions.” “Beginning in the 1950s, the Shaw Brothers began the practice of hiring, on mostly short-term contracts, directors, cinematographers, sound recorders and special effects technicians from Japan … to improve the standards and efficiency of its studio system and to try to open the Japanese market.” “I make movies to satisfy the desires and hopes of my audience; and the core of my audience is Chinese. What they desire to see on the screen are folklore, romances and popular subjects in Chinese history with which they are already familiar. …They miss the homeland they have left behind and the cultural tradition they are still cherishing.” “Its new technology, aggressive marketing, and image of a changeless China combined to push Cathay to the margin (which went into rapid decline after the death of Loke Wan Tho in 1964) and drove the Cantonese film industry to its demise.” “…Shaw Brothers made a breakthrough in its globalization efforts by breaking into the mainstream U.S. market with the kung fu drama Five Fingers of Death (1965), directed by Korean expatriate Cheng Chang Ho.” [no this was 1972] “The subsequent popularity of English-dubbed kung fu films in the 1970s in Africa, Latin America, and the African American communities in the Unites States extended the Shaw Brothers’ global reach.” [something bugs me about this; research later] “…founding of HKTVB in 1965…” “…the 1970s have often been referred to as the “transition period” paving the way for the creation of the Hong Kong cinema that we know today.” “…I want to argue that the Shaw Brothers’ insistence on making martial arts subjects was perhaps also a result of its attempt to localize China for a changing audience.” [on Chang Cheh] “…he recruited more y oung local actors and began to place folklore, myths, and the martial arts tradition of South China in his new works…” [on Chang Cheh] “And their themes continued to be structured around the aesthetics of masculine strength and the values of male bonding, loyalty, and romantic idealism that had been recognized as the signature style of the director (since his One-Armed Swordsman of 1967).” “…the quality and market shares of Shaw Brothers products declined steadily until the mid-1980s, around the time of the death of Runme Shawn, when Run Run Shaw began to shift his energy to the operation of HKTVB and rented out large parts of the Movietown lots to television opera production.” “After a long retirement from acting, she recently returned to the screen with the role of Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” [actually wasn’t that long at all] [shaw Cinema Enterprise and Understanding Cultural Industries by Lily Kong] “The Shaw Organisation was founded in 1924…” “…known as Unique Film Productions…” “By 1965 there were thirty-five companies belonging to Shaw Brothers Ltd., including Shaw Studios in Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong, the largest privately owned studios in the world, which officially opened in 1961.” “…Shaw is the leading distributor of worldwide independent films in Singapore.” “At the peak of Shaw Studios’ output in the 1960s in Hong Kong, production on a new film would start every nine days, with as many as twelve films in production at any one time. Shooting would take only an average of forty days per film.” [magazines published under Chinese Pictorial Review Ltd.] “Movie News” [English], “Southern Screen” “In 1973, Sir Run Run Shaw launched TVB, Hong Kong’s first wireless commercial TV station.” “…emphasizing the myth of unitary pan-Chinese identity.” “…to address local censorship issues, three versions of films would be made if they were aimed to have wide distribution: “a ‘hot’ version for the U.S. Japan and Europe; a ‘cold’ version for Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan; and a ‘medium’ version for Hong Kong.”” [from The Shaw Story online] “Analyzing the Shaw Brothers and their organizations requires that we draw from a whole range of theories that span a continuum of scales from the individual to the firm, the social-cultural, the state, and the global.” “…the student of Shaw films will benefit from analyses of both film texts (the social and cultural meanings in and of films) and the film business and industry (the political economy of film).” “If cultural industries are truly successful, they will contribute to income and employment as well as the quality of life and community development, not least through constructing and challenging sense of identity.” [shaw’s Cantonese Productions and Their Interactions with Contemporary Local and Hollywood Cinema by Law Kar] “…it is natural that Cantonese cinema gradually changed, becoming less didactic and more entertaining from the mid-1950s onward.” “After the interruption of World War II, the Shaw Brothers were among the very first to resume filmmaking in Singapore and Hong Kong, this time exclusively on the Mandarin side because the Nationalist government banned dialect cinema and forbade the export of Cantonese films from Hong Kong.” “…the Mandarin films more or less came out of Run Run Shaw’s Chinese imagination, whereas the Cantonese ones reflected more or less the local Hong Kong reality.” [Embracing Glocalization and Hong Kong-Made Musical Film by Siu Leung Li] “The musical film points to an emerging complex of desire for and an imagination of modernity, transnationality, and local self-identify; the historical epic demonstrates a reimagining of traditional China that was not only for the consumption of reimagining of traditional China that was not only for the consumption of Chinese audiences around the globe but also effective in representing “China” to the world when these films competed and were screened in various international film festivals.” “The pattern of naming also roughly differentiates the good guys who always have Chinese names from the bad guys who usually have English names (it may not be totally unrelated; in Hollywood, arch villains more often than not speak stylishly with a classy British accent).” [Three Readings of Hong Kong Nocturne by Paul G. Pickowicz] “…it has become clear that the revolutionary approach to social, economic, and cultural change in Mainland China has failed and that revolutionaryuprisings in the Third World have sputtered and fizzled.” “One by one, socialist nations in Asia have abandoned socialism (but not single-party dictatorship)…” “Once one understands the film’s transnational nature, then its timelessness and it apolitical entertainment thrust make much more sense.” “It is for this reason that Hong Kong Nocturne, a film released in 1967 that had absolutely nothing to do with the daily lives of ordinary people in Mainland China in 1967, explains so much about daily life in Mainland China in 2007.” [The Black-and-White Wenyi Films of Shaws by Wong Ain-Ling] “In Cantonese films, characters are presented in ready stereotypes, one of the most cherished is the mean landlady…” “In a 1969 interview, veteran director Yue Feng severely criticized ‘wuxia films that emphasis brutality.’” “In the 1960s, there was still some creative room at Shaws, but by the 1970s it was a totally different situation.” “But it is too early to really make an extensive comparison. It is impossible even to draw a conclusive valuation on the films of Shaws alone. The reason is simply that we are still unable to see most films, especially the early productions.” “This coincided with the fact that Hong Kong as the center of wenyi productions was replaced by Taiwan from the mid-1960s onward.” “…Chor Yuen’s (Chu Yuan’s) sword films of the 1970s stand out as a rather unique fusion of the wenyi and wuxia genres, especially Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan…” “…it is obvious that the majority of Hong Kong productions on the list before 1960 were wenyi films. During the years from 1963to 1965, the huangmei diao signing films were most popular, whereas Taiwan wenyi films began to pick up momentum in the mid-1960s, a trend that lasted until the mid-1980s.” [Territorialization and the Entertainment Industry of the Shaw Brothers in Southeast Asia by Sai-Shing Yung] “It is no exaggeration to say that the history of Shaw Brothers between the 1920s and 1960s was in fact a history of movie house construction and acquisition.” “The operation of amusement parks has always been a crucial component of the Shaw Brothers entertainment industry.” [The Shaw Brothers’ Malay Films by Timothy P. Barnard] “From the late 1940s until the mid-1960s, Shaw Brothers was a dominate force in Malay cinema.” “Them ore than 150 films the studio produced had little or no martial arts, and only a handful were based on tales from China.” [bridging the Pacific with Love Eterne by Ramona Curry] “…several Hong Kong media producers – Shaw Brothers foremost among them – undertook to expand their North American markets beyond their long-established followings among Chinese urban immigrant populations in and around the Chinatowns of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Toronto.” “Three Shaw films played at the Cannes International Film Festival between 1960 and 1963: The Enchanting Shadow (Qiannu Youhun, 1960) starring Betty Loh Ti, The Magnificent Concubine (Yang Kwei Fei, 1962); and Empress Wu (Wu Tse-tien)…” “…only the “masculine” martial arts films of the 1960s and 1970s managed a crossover into the North American market…” [i would think that this started in the 1970s with King Boxer] [Reminiscences of the Life of an Actress in Shaw Brother’s Movietown by Cheng Pei-pei] “In 1961, I immigrated to Hong Kong from Shanghai.” “I enrolled, in 1962, in the Performing Arts Training classes at the Shaw Brothers South China Experimental Drama Center…” “Immediately after graduation from the Center in 1963, I signed the basic seven-year actor’s contract with the Shaw Brothers.” “Indeed, it is true that we were almost entirely ignorant of what went on outside of the Shaw studio.” “One can still find this second residence hall, but, of course it is no longer new. It has now been transformed into TVB’s martial arts direction department’s storage area.” “Due to the social unrest that took place in Hong Kong in 1967, my mother, stepfather, younger brother, and sister all immigrated to Australia.” “Even when I did not have movies to make, I would do voice dubbing or give dance lessons in order to make a little extra money. I also studied dressmaking and took English and ballet lesions.” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member KyFi Posted February 8, 2011 Member Share Posted February 8, 2011 Thanks for taking the time to post that, masterofoneinchpunch---some nice info there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Sheng Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 The last 3 essays do look interesting to me though... But not one chapter on Wuxia or Kung Fu, guess that's why this didn't find a place in my Amazon shopping cart so far... As for now, no other book contains more fascinating and detailed inside information on those genres from a Shaw perspective than "Chang Che : A Memoir", published by the HK Film Archive in 2004. Strangely a book that is hardly ever mentioned, not even by compulsive Shaw addicts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member masterofoneinchpunch Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 The last 3 essays do look interesting to me though... But not one chapter on Wuxia or Kung Fu, guess that's why this didn't find a place in my Amazon shopping cart so far... As for now, no other book contains more fascinating and detailed inside information on those genres from a Shaw perspective than "Chang Che : A Memoir", published by the HK Film Archive in 2004. Strangely a book that is hardly ever mentioned, not even by compulsive Shaw addicts. I've been looking for that book for awhile but it is never on Amazon US or ebay (when I did ebay). Also the last essay is quite fun (a bit short). The two before that I really did not like (stated why in the essay) and really go over less Shaw Brothers than you think would be in a Shaw Brothers book. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Sheng Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 @ masterofoneinchpunch This is the link to the HK film archive and their publications: http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/en/4-1.php I can also recommend the book on CHOR YUEN released in 2006 as part of their their Oral History Series. Think you can order the books from them directly, check the purchase information on their site. Of course the archive is a must visit when in HK, you can buy all their publications there ... and the price for that very attractively illustrated Chang Cheh book is lower than that of an IVL disc! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member masterofoneinchpunch Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 @ masterofoneinchpunch This is the link to the HK film archive and their publications: http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/en/4-1.php I can also recommend the book on CHOR YUEN released in 2006 as part of their their Oral History Series. Think you can order the books from them directly, check the purchase information on their site. Of course the archive is a must visit when in HK, you can buy all their publications there ... and the price for that very attractively illustrated Chang Cheh book is lower than that of an IVL disc! Thanks for the link, but can your order from that site? I could not find anything that states where you can purchase it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Sheng Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 Hmm, the postshop that they link here... http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/en/4-3.php ... says that the Chang Che book is out of stock. The Archive certainly still has copies, bought mine there at Xmas time. If I'd be you I would call the enquiry number there and find out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member masterofoneinchpunch Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 Hmm, the postshop that they link here... http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/en/4-3.php ... says that the Chang Che book is out of stock. The Archive certainly still has copies, bought mine there at Xmas time. If I'd be you I would call the enquiry number there and find out. Thanks, thats the link I was looking for. Good prices, I also want The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study. But that Out of Stock for Cheh is quite annoying. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member panku Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 I've been looking for that book for awhile but it is never on Amazon US I had a hard time locating Chang Cheh: A Memoir as well but I got lucky and one showed up on Amazon US in December of 2009 from a seller. I would keep looking! I have also had a hard time finding Director Chor Yuen, but have not been so lucky. I have written to a few used book stores in Hong Kong but no luck there either. Both the Archive site and their shop through post site have said the book was out of stock so I didn't think of calling them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Sheng Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 These publications are way too specialized to be found in used book shops (dunno, but HK isn't really a place for used book shops.... I know of only one antiquarian book shop on Hollywood Road). Anyway, the Archive still had all these books when I was there in December. Guess on my next visit I just grab a few more copies! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member panku Posted February 9, 2011 Member Share Posted February 9, 2011 The two stores I contacted seem like they could have had some of these specialty books. One was FLOW at 40 Lyndhurst Terrace and the other was The Book Attic at 7-17 Amoy Street. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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