Man-Fung Yip
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9789888390717
- eISBN:
- 9789888390397
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888390717.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter investigates how, in the context of Hong Kong’s rapidly growing urban-industrial modernity of the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation of sense stimuli and sense activities had radically ...
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This chapter investigates how, in the context of Hong Kong’s rapidly growing urban-industrial modernity of the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation of sense stimuli and sense activities had radically altered the sensory-affective experience of the real. This, in turn, is shown to have a paradigmatic impact on the martial arts film, which was rapidly embracing a new, unprecedented level of sensationalism—or “sensory realism,” that is, a mode of realism grounded not so much in visual resemblance between image and world as in the correlations between a film’s sensory and visceral stimulations and the viewer’s real-life sense experiences. It is from this perspective that martial arts films of the period can be seen as bringing a “modern” or “modernist” style to Hong Kong cinema—a style predicated on speed, impact, and new forms of cinematic materiality and tactility.Less
This chapter investigates how, in the context of Hong Kong’s rapidly growing urban-industrial modernity of the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation of sense stimuli and sense activities had radically altered the sensory-affective experience of the real. This, in turn, is shown to have a paradigmatic impact on the martial arts film, which was rapidly embracing a new, unprecedented level of sensationalism—or “sensory realism,” that is, a mode of realism grounded not so much in visual resemblance between image and world as in the correlations between a film’s sensory and visceral stimulations and the viewer’s real-life sense experiences. It is from this perspective that martial arts films of the period can be seen as bringing a “modern” or “modernist” style to Hong Kong cinema—a style predicated on speed, impact, and new forms of cinematic materiality and tactility.
