Legacies of the Drunken Master

Abstract

In 1978, the film Drunken Master caused a stir in Hong Kong cinema, mixing martial arts and knockabout humour to huge box office success, breaking the mould of the ‘serious’ (tragic-heroic) martial arts film and sparking a trend for kung fu comedies. However, the kung fu comedy remains under-represented in the literature on martial arts cinema. Legacies of the Drunken Master investigates this genre in relation to its shifting historical contexts: the aftermath of the radical youth movements of the 1960s; a (post-)colonial, globalizing Hong Kong sitting in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution; the emerging consciousness of the 1997 handover of the colony to Chinese control; and the transnationalisation of cinema audiences. My analysis interrogates the politics of these films within these contexts, with special regard to their representations of the performing body. The book draws on an interdisciplinary engagement with popular culture, as well as interrogating the critical literature on Hong Kong and martial arts cinema, in order to offer original readings in terms of carnival, utopia, violence, hysteria and masculinity. It focuses on the heyday of the kung fu comedy in the 1970s and 1980s, but also explores its later developments, and its ‘legacy’ in cinematic culture today.