The Cinema of Stephen Chow

An in-depth exploration of the stardom and authorship of Stephen Chow Sing-chi, one of Hong Kong cinema’s most enduringly popular stars and among its most commercially successful directors.

In the West, Stephen Chow is renowned as the ground-breaking director and star of global blockbusters such as Kung Fu Hustle (2004) and Shaolin Soccer (2001). Among Hong Kong audiences, Chow is celebrated as the leading purveyor of local comedy, popularising the so-called mo-lei-tau (“gibberish”) brand of Cantonese vernacular humour, and cultivating a style of madcap comedy that often masks a trenchant social commentary.

This volume approaches Chow from a diverse range of critical perspectives. Each of the essays, written by a host of renowned international scholars, offers compelling new interpretations of familiar hits such as From Beijing with Love (1994) and Journey to the West (2013). The detailed case studies of seminal local and global movies provide overdue critical attention to Chow’s filmmaking, highlighting the aesthetic power, economic significance, and cultural impact of his films in both domestic and global markets.

Author Biography

Gary Bettinson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai (2015). He is co-editor (with James Udden) of The Poetics of Chinese Cinema (2016), and (with Daniel Martin) of Hong Kong Horror Cinema (2018). He is chief editor of the journal Asian Cinema.

Vivian P.Y. Lee is Associate Professor of Chinese and History at City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is author of The Other Side of Glamour: The Left-wing Studio Network in Hong Kong Cinema in the Cold War Era and Beyond (2020) and Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: the Post-nostalgic Imagination (2009). She is editor of East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations (2011).