Hong Kong Crime Films - by Kristof Van Den Troost

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Hong Kong Crime Films is a richly textured, deeply rewarding contribution to Hong Kong film studies and to histories of censorship in world film.

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.

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.