Chunga news

I feel I've been saying this every three months for the past year, but I think we really are close to printing this time. We met yesterday to go over a last few things. I've done a last typo hunt. I need to tweak my editorial a bit. We're aiming to send it to the printer at the end of the week. Fingers crossed! It's a strong issue, at least, so I hope it's worth the wait.

Nice crowd at the pubmeet yesterday too. Good energy, man.

Planet Hong Kong Redux

Film critic David Bordwell is releasing an updated version of his 2000 book about the Hong Kong film industry, Planet Hong Kong. I read the book not long after it came out, and I thought it was terrific. I still think it's one of the best film books I've ever read. (I think the blog he keeps with Kristin Thompson, Observations on film art, is terrific too. Amongst other things, he and Kristin write a lot about silent film. They just published a piece on The Ten Best Films of 1920.)

Now Bordwell is trying an interesting experiment. He's revised and updated the book, adding 30,000 words and 150 color stills, bringing his coverage up to 2010 with chapters on post-1998 work by Stephen Chow, Wong Kar Wai, and Johnnie To. The experimental part is that he is self-publishing the book as a PDF, which he will be charging money for. I haven't decided whether I'm going to cough up the money for the PDF. It will depend on how much he's asking and further thinking on my part about whether I'd be willing to read it onscreen or whether I'd want to print it out (and what printing it out would look like). Either way, it's an interesting endeavor that I thought was worth calling attention to.

Here's Bordwell on some of things he's doing in the book:

Readers not drawn to Hong Kong cinema might find my more general arguments of interest. For example, I suggest that Hong Kong shows us how important regional and diasporan networks are in creating and maintaining a film culture. To the claim that films reflect their societies, I reply that Hong Kong films suggest a different way to think about such a dynamic, using the model of cultural conversation. Readers interested in fandom should find something intriguing in the story of how cultists around the world helped establish Hong Kong film as a cool thing in the early 1990s. I also argue against the tendency in film studies to assume that when a film tradition doesn’t follow the rules of classical plot construction it must be based on something called “spectacle.” I suggest instead that we need to study principles of episodic plotting, which are probably quite common in popular art generally. In these and other areas, I wanted to use this cinema as a way into thinking about popular moviemaking as a whole.

Image of the Day

Address Unknown (1944)