Fighting without fighting Kung Fu cinema's journey to the West

White (visual culture and fine art, Middlesex Univ., UK) offers a comprehensive and eminently readable history of Hong Kong (and by extension, all Chinese) cinema as it was received by and influenced the Anglophone West. The study has a twofold purpose: to narrate that transnational history and to analyze its political, social, and cultural implications for both China and the West. White cannily avoids the many pitfalls such a study could engender and instead theorizes the larger implications of the impact of wuxia films (i.e., films with martial hero/ines on Western television, e.g., the Kung Fu series), comic books, cinema, magazines, and popular culture, not to mention the explosion of martial arts instruction in the West beginning in the 1970s. White devotes chapters to production and reception of Hong Kong cinema, US reception of that cinema, African American identification with and appropriation of Kung Fu culture, how martial arts films featuring white male protagonists radically transformed the genre, women in martial arts cinema, and the postmillennial wave of art house Kung Fu cinema. In the end, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as White demonstrates a tapestry of a cinema of resistance and rebellion across national, ethnic, and gender lines. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Kevin J. Wetmore, Loyola Marymount University

For a span of months in 1973, the No. 1 movies in the United States had titles like Five Fingers of Death, Lady Kung Fu, and The Chinese Boxer. White (Legacies of the Drunken Master) explores why the genre films were popular and how they may have faded at the box office, but their influence continues to inform Western culture. Beginning with an overview of martial arts in Chinese culture, White traces how narratives built around hand-to-hand combat traveled from Chinese literature to opera and finally to motion pictures, starting with early (and sadly lost) silent films. He discusses how Western (chiefly American) audiences were primed to receive these violent, anti-authoritarian, and poorly dubbed films in the wake of the turbulent 1960s and increasingly graphic fare offered by Hollywood. He then explores how imagery from these movies influenced Black power, white suburbs, and feminism, resulting in cultural icons like Wu-Tang Clan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Matrix franchise. VERDICT White's scholarly take on Hollywood's infatuation with kung fu offers multiple entry points for readers, from film historians to sociologists. Action film fans will come away with a deeper appreciation of these films, and an expanded watch list.--Terry Bosky