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Hong Kong Crime Films
Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986
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Book Presentation:
Examines the history of the Hong Kong crime film before 1986
• Departs from the predominant focus on action aesthetics in studies of Hong Kong cinema to focus on the early crime film’s close links to local society and politics
• Draws on years of research on censorship and the crime film in archives in Hong Kong and in the United Kingdom
• Provides ample evidence of the often-overlooked role film censorship played in shaping Hong Kong genre cinema
• Connects the appearance of the modern crime film in the late 1960s and 1970s to the growing consciousness of a distinctive Hong Kong identity
Hong Kong Crime Films is the first book detailing the post-war history of the genre before the release of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), the film that put Hong Kong action-crime on the global map. Focusing on what it calls the mode of ‘criminal realism’ in the crime film, the book shows how depictions of Hong Kong’s social reality (including crime) were for decades anxiously policed by colonial censors, and how crime films tended (and still tend) to confound and transgress critical definitions of realism.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Hong Kong Crime Films covers several neglected topics in the study of Hong Kong cinema, such as the evolving generic landscape of the crime film prior to the 1980s, the influence of colonial film censorship on the genre, and the prominence and contestation of "realism" in the local history of the crime film.
About the Author:
Kristof Van den Troost is Assistant Professor at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
Press Reviews:
Hong Kong Crime Films is a richly textured, deeply rewarding contribution to Hong Kong film studies and to histories of censorship in world film.
– Karen Fang, Film Quarterly
A comprehensive and sophisticated review of one of the most important and yet least studied film genres of Hong Kong cinema. Clearly written and richly historicized, it illuminates the significant link between crime film and the questions of colonialism, political censorship, and social changes. This timely and compelling book goes a long way toward filling an important gap in Hong Kong cinema studies.
– Po-Shek Fu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
In this book, Van Den Troost combines his rigorous archival investigation with original textual analyses. The result is an insightful examination of not only the genre itself, but also how cinematic realism in Hong Kong has been actively informed by police governmentality, censorship, and contesting social affects under colonialism.
– Victor Fan, King’s College London
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> On a related topic:
Experts in Action (2021)
Transnational Hong Kong-Style Stunt Work and Performance
The Other Side of Glamour (2020)
The Left-Wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond
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