Hong Kong Crime Films

Hong Kong Crime Films details the post-war history of the Hong Kong crime film prior to the release of John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986), the film that turned it into perhaps the signature genre from Hong Kong. Focusing on what it calls the mode of 'criminal realism' in the crime film, this book shows how depictions of Hong Kong's social reality were for decades anxiously policed by colonial censors, and how crime films tended 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. Kristof Van den Troost is Assistant Professor at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).