Il professore che volteggia

A proposito di "Planet Hong Kong"

Abstract

The article tries to define the role played by Planet Hong Kong. Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment in David Bordwell’s extensive bibliography, starting with the attention he always paid to popular cinema, on the one hand, and Far Eastern cinema, on the other. After defining the essential characteristics of the book (the focus on film analysis, the insistence on objective data, the non-academic tones, a certain closeness to the politique des auteurs, the placing of cinema as cinema at the center of all discourse), the article dwells on how Planet Hong Kong undoubtedly fostered a growth of academic interest in the cinema of the former British colony, posing a number of questions that will later be taken up and developed by others: the relationship between local and global, the connection between Hong Kong cinema and Hollywood production, the importance of the ‘pause-burst-pause’ model that structures the action sequences, becoming almost a paradigm of ‘Chinese kine- matics’, the centrality that the actor’s body assumes in it, and how all this is transformed into a sensorial experience with very particular characteristics.