Cinema approaching reality : locating chinese film theory
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Cinema approaching reality : locating chinese film theory
University of Minnesota Press, c2015
- : hardcover
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-251) and index
Includes filmography
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Cinema Approaching Reality, Victor Fan brings together, for the first time, Chinese and Euro-American film theories and theorists to engage in critical debates about film in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1920s through 1940s. His point of departure is a term popularly employed by Chinese film critics during this period, bizhen, often translated as "lifelike" but best understood as "approaching reality." What these Chinese theorists mean, in Fan's reading, is that the cinematographic image is not a form of total reality, but it can allow spectators to apprehend an effect as though they had been there at the time when an event actually happened.
Fan suggests that the phrase "approaching reality" can help to renegotiate an aporia (blind spot) that influential French film critic Andre Bazin wrestled with: the cinematographic image is a trace of reality, yet reality is absent in the cinematographic image, and the cinema makes present this absence as it reactivates the passage of time. Fan enriches Bazinian cinematic ontology with discussions on cinematic reality in Republican China and colonial Hong Kong, putting Western theorists-from Bazin and Kracauer to Baudrillard, Agamben, and Deleuze-into dialogue with their Chinese counterparts. The result is an eye-opening exploration of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew, especially in the photographic materiality following its digital turn.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Approaching Reality: Chinese Ontology and the Potentiality of Time
2. Cinema of Thought: Directed Consciousness in Chinese Marxist Film Theory
3. Soft Film Theory: Lifein All Its Presence and Concreteness
4. Fey Mou: The Presence of an Absence
5. Cinema of Ideation, Cinema of Play: The Early Cantonese Sound Film
Conclusion
Notes
Filmography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
