Surveillance in Asian Cinema Under Eastern Eyes [Hardcover]

Critical theory and popular wisdom are rife with images of surveillance as an intrusive, repressive practice often suggestively attributed to eastern powers and opposed to western liberalism. Hollywood-dominated global media has long promulgated a geopoliticized east-west axis of freedom vs. control. This book focuses on Asian and Asia-based films and cinematic traditions obscured by lopsided western hegemonic discourse andmore specificallyprobes these films treatments of a phenomenon that western film often portrays with neo-orientalist hysteria. Exploring recent and historical movies made in post-social and anti-Communist societies such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, the book picks up on the political and economic concerns implicitly underlying Sinophobic and anti-Communist Asian images in Hollywood films while also considering how these societies and states depict the issues of centralization, militarization and technological innovation so often figured as distinctive of the difference between eastern despotism and western liberalism.

Introduction: Asian Cinema and the Surveillance Archipelago

[Karen Fang]

Part I: Cold War

1. The Might of the People: Counter-Espionage Films and Participatory Surveillance in the Early PRC

[Xiaoning Lu]

2. Closely Watched Films: Surveillance and Postwar Hong Kong Leftist Cinema

[Man-fung Yip]

3. The Dis/appearance of Animals in Animated Film during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976

[Daisy Yan Du]

Part II: Market Reform

4. Under Western Eyes? Colonial Bureaucracy, Surveillance and the Birth of the Hong Kong Crime Film

[Kristof Van den Troost]

5. Taiwans Cold War Geopolitics in in Edward Yangs The Terrorizers

[Catherine Liu]

6. Sovereignty, Surveillance and Spectacl“.