The aesthetics of mythical violence in Hong Kong action films

Abstract

Hong Kong cinema is known throughout the world for its action cinema, including martial arts films and gangster pictures that portray violence as an integral part of their appeal. This article examines the nature of violence in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, borrowing concepts from Walter Benjamin's essay Critique of violence to define the violence in Hong Kong action films as mythical and aestheticized. The article analyses a body of films such as King Hu's classic A Touch of Zen (197071), John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1987) and Johnnie To's Election (2004) to support its thesis. The mythical violence portrayed in these films, it is argued, constructs a critique of violence. Furthermore, the films set up a wider framework of discourse about violence itself as a method of questioning social institutions and norms affecting gender.

Violence in the Media is Helpful - Does It Lessen Violence in the Audience?

“…After World War II, the Cold War between the two political camps, capitalism, and socialism, cast a heavier shadow of war over the hearts of briefly at-peace people [21]. Since Western society entered the 1960s, popular culture has gradually gained the power it lacked in the past in the propagation of postmodern theories, because one of the most important characteristics of popular culture is its consumption [13], and since then it can play the signboard of consumption in public and write "entertainment" on the artistic banner without fear of reprimand.…”