Milkyway Image: Producing Hong Kong Film Genres for Global Consumption

ISBN-13: 9789813365773 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 137 str.

Yi Sun

Spis treści

1 The Film Production Company

Hollywood studios and industry analysis

Media industry studies and the independent production company

Hong Kong film companies: past and present

Conclusion

2 Hong Kong Film Industry in Transition

Industry in crisis

Production companies in transformation

Conclusion

3 Bringing the Old to the New: Formation and Development of Milkyway

Milkyway as a business entity

Milkyway as a creative team

Conclusion

4 From Hong Kong to the Mainland: Milkyway’s Production and Business Practices

Establishing a brand for the Hong Kong audience

Expanding into the mainland Chinese market

Conclusion

5 In Defence of Hong Kong: Milkyway Films’ Domestic Critical Reception

Hong Kong’s film community since the mid-1990s

Milkyway films as mirrors of Hong Kong

Redefining Hong Kong cinema through Milkyway films

Conclusion

6 Shaping Hong Kong Cinema’s New Icon: Milkyway at International Film Festivals

Debut: specialised film festivals

Breakthrough: Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Toronto

Beyond and after major festivals

Conclusion

7 Defining Hong Kong Cinema through Distribution: Milkyway Films in the United States

The ‘return’ of Hong Kong film

The ‘disappearance’ of Hong Kong identity

The Chinese connection

Conclusion

8 Building a Hong Kong Studio Brand: Milkyway’s Changing Image in Overseas Critical Reception

Milkyway as an invisible factory

Milkyway as a period in Johnnie To’s career

Milkyway as a house style and a brand per se

Conclusion

O autorze

Yi Sun is Lecturer in the College of Media and International Culture at Zhejiang University. Her research interests include screen industries, Chinese-language cinema, film genre, film authorship, and film historiography. She has published in journals such as Asian Cinema, Transnational Cinemas, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Adaptation. She has received the 2018 Peter Morris Prize presented by the Film Studies Association of Canada for the best essay published in Canadian Journal of Film Studies.

Blurb

This book adopts an integrative research framework that primarily combines industrial and discourse analysis to investigate the company Milkyway Image, drawing upon literature that studies film studios and the practices of film production, distribution, and reception. The history of the Hong Kong-based film production company Milkyway Image from its founding in 1996 to the present exemplifies the metamorphosis of the post-return Hong Kong film industry to an era characterised by Hong Kong’s integration into a Chinese national context and the transnationalisation of world cinema. It shows that contemporary Hong Kong cinema’s transition resists a monolithic chronicle and instead represents a narrative combining the perspectives of different interest groups and a complex process of compliance and resistance, negotiation and contestation. The meaning of Milkyway’s films shifts as they are circulated across cultures and viewed within diverse frameworks, and our understanding of Hong Kong cinema is subject to varying contexts and historical configurations.  

For researchers in film and media studies and those who have a general interest in Hong Kong cinema, Asian cinema, or contemporary film culture, this book reveals how a variety of industry and cultural bodies have become co-creators of meaning for a film production house, and how the company operates as a co-creator of the discourse that surrounds it.