Cinescapes of the 'yet-to-be-fully-national': Hong Kong action cinema's transnational engagement (China)

Hong Kong action cinema's global engagement advances an inherently transnational cinescape, both as a cinematic landscape and as a cine-escape. Chapter one commences this argument by outlining the gongfupian's [martial arts film] alternative action aesthetics in rupturing Hollywood's monopoly over the action cinema. Chapter two applies Hong Kong's transnationality to its geopolitical status, film industry, and global audience by positioning Hong Kong as the "yet-to-be-fully-national" to critique Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith's national paradigm. Chapter three foregrounds Hong Kong cinema's extended "domestic" market that incorporated huaqiao [overseas Chinese] communities. Chapter four investigates the kung fu vague's [wave] problematic critical reception when it reached a more inclusive global audience outside of its ethnocentric huaqiao circuit in the early 1970s due to its poor dubbing practices. Referencing Rick Altman and Michel Chion's theories on film sound, the ventriloquist imperative for exact lip synchronization is dismissed by unveiling a continuum of synchresis practices across both mono- and multi-lingual domains. Chapter five highlights Bruce Lee's Fanonian "yellow mask" as the on-screen kung fu superman. Lee epitomized the kung fu vague by selecting for the silver screen only the most cinematically spectacular fight choreography based on his off-screen martial arts perfection in Jeet Kune Do. Chapter six concentrates on Jackie Chan's action braggadocio and his aesthetics of verifiable pain by means of overlapping action and outtakes. Chapter seven travels to France to focus on Hong Kong action cinema's transnational engagement within cinema's hexagonal nexus. The French initiated HK venture, composed of HK Video and HK Orient Extreme Cinema, exemplifies the reinvigoration of a national film culture by an otherwise "foreign" cinema. Chapter eight concludes by invoking transnational engagements as the de facto cultural reality by which even already imagined national communities come to terms with the limits of a sui generis national culture. Under this rubric, the will to imagine and re-imagine communal cultural connections within a transnational mode reveals that even fully nationalized imagined communities remain, like Hong Kong, yet-to-be-fully-national themselves.