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

This paper seeks to better understand China’s role in film co-productions with Asian partners through a model of compara-tive 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 technology of aspiration and an aesthetics of verti-cality. 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 inter-connections 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 differentia trajectories within the region.