Another day at The Office: Huallywood co-productions, verticality, and the project of a comparative film studies

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to better understand China’s role in film co-productions with Asian partners through a model of comparative film studies. Taking the Hong Kong-China coproduction The Office as a case study, the paper explores how the film allegorizes a dynamic of economic polarization, rendered through a technology of aspiration and an aesthetics of verticality. I suggest that any theorization of verticality and aspiration in The Office and in other regional co-productions might be better served by a more ‘horizontal’ form of thinking, such as that proposed by an emergent project of comparative film studies outlined by Paul Willeman to account for new interconnections in film production taking place in the Asia Pacific. The paper outlines what is at stake in a vertical characterization of Huallywood co-productions, and the capacity of comparative film studies to register capitalism’s differential trajectories within the region.