ABSTRACT
Before discussing Stephen Chow’s contribution to the specific contradictions of world cinema (an analysis that will require the recent work of Quentin Tarantino as a foil) I want to situate this phenomenon in terms of critical categories and symptoms. The idea here is not to displace the important cultural impact of Chinese cinemas within globalisation but to give some sense of the degree to which this emergence must be read as a necessary injunction to rethink globalisation’s processes and the circulation of culture within them. The path to Shaolin Soccer (Chow, 2001) via a concept of niche cinema may seem a relatively easy one, a no-nonsense case of ‘nonsense film’ as a sub-genre of comedy; yet, whether we glory in this popular segment or not (and ‘popular’ is very much a loaded term in global cinema) there is more at stake in its apprehension, especially and precisely because of East Asia’s central role in accumulation on a world scale. The power of the niche is not simply a consequence of economic prowess but is integral to its very possibility as a mode and strategy. On one level niche cinema may be read as a logical extension of this power through the development of transnational image markets, but it also helps to understand the limits of this system in its form and substance, liminal edges that become apparent in the ambivalent codes of visual quotation. Indeed, I will argue that the niche and quotation together constitute vital lines of inquiry that question the assumed parameters of world cinema at this time.
