Mass Camp in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema

Abstract

This chapter considers Hong Kong’s particular socio-historical context since the 1960s, which has been imperative to the diffusion of a local mass camp impulse characterized by a self-conscious, often parodic attitude toward the artifice of conventions, particularly those associated with art, gender behavior, and media representation. It then investigates the particular ways in which mass camp has at once informed and been informed by Hong Kong mainstream cinema from the 1970s onward. A crucial point made throughout lies in the intimate relationship between mass camp and the proliferating gender parody of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, culminating in films of the early 1990s (e.g. Swordsman II). This process, importantly, has also been coupled with the critical articulation of camp discourse since the mid-to-late 1970s.