Xia Yan and the Chinese School of Film

A revolutionary, film theorist, and screenwriter, Xia Yan (1900–1995) is known as one of the pioneers of Chinese cinema. Xia’s pursuit of a national style and international status for Chinese cinema and his aspirations for the prosperity of the Chinese nation are in line with the basic ideas and goals of the nascent “Chinese School of Film.” In the context of the under-theorized and problematic production practices of current Chinese cinema, it is high time to revisit Xia’s professional and academic contributions to cinematic art, which shed light on the construction of both the “Chinese School of Film” and “shared aesthetics.”

Thinking, Feeling and Experiencing the “Empty Shot” in Cinema

This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” ( kong jingtou 空镜头) from the perspective of Chinese philosophical thought and aesthetics. In Chinese cinema, the “empty shot” is understood as a shot comprised of nonhuman subjects, distinct from both the establishing shot and the cutaway. Perhaps due to the lack of understanding of its philosophical grounding, the “empty shot” has not received much attention in Anglophone film studies, and has been criticized as an overgeneralised concept. This article first relates the “empty shot” to the more widely accepted “pillow shot” in Anglophone studies of Japanese cinema. This article aims to make visible a non-anthropocentric worldview conveyed through the “empty shot”, and to make space for the potentialities of this film device, which may also be found in non-Chinese cinemas. It explains the “empty shot”’s central features: firstly, its visible scenes are imbued with invisible emotion, leaving space for the audience to feel what the characters are feeling. Second, it facilitates the generation of qi or “air” in a film, indicating the circulation of qi in a process of dynamic transformation between “actual” and “virtual”. Thirdly, the “empty shot” communicates with the audience, allowing them to more fully experience natural scenery and to encounter other beings while suspending everyday experiences, existing biases, and the separation between self and other.

Affect, blankness, theatrics: Rurality and faciality in three Chinese instances

The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social–political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.

‘Why am I still imprisoned in your eyes?’: Re-visioning ‘leftover women’ and the female gaze in Send Me to the Clouds

This article studies how a recent Chinese women’s film Send Me to the Clouds (2019) explores different ways of looking as innovative cinematic strategies of constructing and empowering the precarious female subject against a postsocialist patriarchal ideology that dominates gendered narratives and audio-visual codes of the mainstream Chinese cinema. The film is centred upon a 30-year-old ‘leftover woman’ Sheng Nan’s distressful life experiences and her anger at the prevailing sexism and ageism. Rather than being tamed or domesticated, throughout the film the angry and restless woman is shown to be constantly on the motion, making every effort to experiment with alternative looking relations that seek to destroy the voyeuristic pleasure and disciplinary power of the privileged male gaze, as well as to explore possibilities of creating a self-reflective and critical female gaze. A contextualized critical study of the female authorship and agency on and behind the screen will shed new light on how contemporary Chinese women filmmakers take on ‘concrete and various negotiations’ with the structure of domination and its representational system via ‘their socially and politically conditioned cinematic practice or performance’.