The Martial Art of “Cinema”: Modes of Virtuosity à la Hong Kong and the Philippines

The cinematic mode of production has orchestrated the real subsumption of society by capital unevenly in the Asia-Pacific, affecting film form, genre, gender, performativity, and exhibitionism in various ways, as well as structures of agency and regimes of truth. Variations in Chinese, Hong Kong, and Philippine cinema are explored here, each demonstrating differing inflections in relation to digitization, finance capital, gender performativity, and generic style. Haptic mapping, the rapidly oscillating gender of the “female” martial artist, the transcendent “male” virtuosic body, and “stuplime” (coined by Sianne Ngai) farce are among the formal innovations occasioned by the digital maelstrom of informatic capital. Taken together these indicate a transformed terrain of domination and struggle—one that requires an attention to regional specificity as well as an understanding of a geopolitically integrated world-media system for adequate conceptualization.