Cinema approaching reality : locating Chinese film theory / Victor Fan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fan, Victor, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Motion pictures.

Film criticism--China--History.

Film criticism.

Motion pictures--China--History.

History.

China.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 277 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis ; London : University of Minnesota Press, [2015]

Summary:

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 the 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 can allow spectators to apprehend an effect as though they had been there at the time when an event actually happened. "Approaching reality" can help to renegotiate an aporia (blind spot) that influential French film critic André 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 into dialogue with their Chinese counterparts. The result is an engaging study of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Approaching reality: Chinese ontology and the potentiality of time

Cinema of thought: directed consciousness in Chinese Marxist film theory

Soft film theory: life in all its presence and concreteness

Fey Mou: the presence of an absence

Cinema of ideation, cinema of play: the early Cantonese sound film

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references, filmography and index.

ISBN:

9780816693559

0816693552

9780816693573

0816693579

OCLC:

888400681