Peter Ho-Sun Chan's He's a Woman, She's a Man

Cover

PETER HO-SUN CHAN’S He’s a Woman, She’s a Man LISA ODHAM STOKES Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further information see p. iv. PETER HO-SUN CHAN’S He’s a Woman, She’s a Man THE NEW HONG KONG CINEMA SERIES The New Hong Kong Cinema came into existence under very special circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting in a change of cultural paradigms. Such crit ical moments have produced the cinematic achievements of the early Soviet cinema, neorealism, the nouvelle vague, and the German cinema of the 1970s and, we can now say, the New Hong Kong Cinema. If this cinema grew increasingly intriguing in the 1980s, after the announcement of Hong Kong’s return to China, it is largely because it had to confront a new cultural and political space that was both complex and hard to define, where the problems of colonialism were uncannily overlaid with those of globalism. Such uncanniness could not be caught through straight documentary or conventional history writing: it was left to the cinema to define it. Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema now come to an end? However we answer the question, there is a need to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong cinema. This series distinguishes itself from the other books on the subject by focusing in-depth on individual Hong Kong films, which together make the New Hong Kong Cinema. Series General Editors Ackbar Abbas, Wimal Dissanayake, Mette Hjort, Gina Marchetti, Stephen Teo Series Advisors Chris Berry, Nick Browne, Ann Hui, Leo Lee, Li Cheuk-to, Patricia Mellencamp, Meaghan Morris, Paul Willemen, Peter Wollen, Wu Hung Other titles in the series Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs – Th e Trilogy by Gina Marchetti Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian by Wendy Gan John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow by Karen Fang John Woo’s Bullet in the Head by Tony Williams John Woo’s The Killer by Kenneth E. Hall Johnnie To Kei-fung’s PTU by Michael Ingham King Hu’s A Touch of Zen by Stephen Teo Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting’s An Autumn’s Tale by Stacilee Ford Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage by Mette Hjort Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain by Andrew Schroeder Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time by Wimal Dissanayake Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together by Jeremy Tambling Yuen Woo-ping’s Wing Chun by Sasha Vojković ...