Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

Hong Kong cinema exploded into world culture during the 1990s, driven by its linkage with Hollywood’s dynamic new digital special effects technologies. This book provides essential historical background to that remarkable set of events by analyzing the culture, political and technological network surrounding Tsui Hark’s masterful but under-appreciated Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain.

Schroeder examines how the film transformed Hong Kong action cinema from the 1980s to the present, which resulted in its rise as a dominant transnational style in close affiliation with the transformation of Hollywood cinema into a digital technology driven global enterprise.

Andrew Schroeder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.

“This is a sophisticated, informative and theoretically challenging study of Tsui Hark’s film. It is the first to offer an in-depth examination of the concrete implications of Tsui Hark as an innovator and modernizer of Hong Kong cinema. Most impressive is Schroeder’s meticulous analysis of the technologies of transnationalism, using the film as an example of the triumph of a postmodern ‘pastiche’ aesthetic in Hong Kong cinema by systematically borrowing and remaking the decontextualized fragments of Hollywood’s hardware and software.” —Sasha Vojkovic, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology