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.

An Analysis of Narrative Techniques and Creative Skills in the Documentary "Four Springs"

In 2019, the documentary "Four Springs" was released in Chinese cinemas. Even with little publicity and competition from other blockbusters, the film has done remarkably well relative to documentary films. In addition, "Four Springs" won the honor of the best documentary in the 12th First Youth Film Festival that year, and this documentary based on the ordinary daily family life attracted wide attention. "Four Springs" focuses on the family life, focuses on showing the most real and simple pictures of life, it deeply excavates the thoughts between families that are difficult to cut off, and shows the audience the author's silent talk about his hometown, his family and his relatives with the pictures that reflect the documentary aesthetics. This paper will analyze "Four Springs" from two aspects of narrative techniques and creative skills.

Transnational Chinese Cinemas

The term “transnational Chinese cinemas” first appeared in 1997 in the anthology Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. It was coined, theorized, and introduced in the book by editor Sheldon Lu. That was also the first time the phrase “transnational cinema” was used as a book title in world film studies. The immediate occasion for the rise of this concept had to do with the cultural landscape of Greater China and of the world in general in the post-Cold War period. Film coproduction across national and regional borders became a possibility again and was done more frequently. In the case of the Greater Chinese region of the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, filmmakers began to cooperate across the Taiwan Straits to make joint productions; they secured funding and established channels of circulation beyond their immediate territories. Simply put, transnational cinema is a cinema of border crossing, and transnational film studies transcends the unit of the nation state in film analysis. It can be understood as a model of film studies, a critical paradigm, a description of the film industry, and a type of film. The full methodological, historical, and critical implications of transnational Chinese film studies are first outlined in the introduction to the book Transnational Chinese Cinemas. Transnationalism is grasped at the following levels: First, the split of China into the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in modern history and consequently the coexistence of three competing national and local Chinese cinemas; second, the globalization of the production, circulation, and consumption of Chinese film in the age of transnational capitalism since the 1990s; third, the representation and questioning of “China” and “Chineseness” in filmic discourse itself—namely, the cross-examination of the national, cultural, political, ethnic, and gender identity of individuals and communities in the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora; fourth, a re-viewing of and revisiting the history of Chinese ‘national cinema’ as if to read the ‘prehistory’ of transnational filmic discourse backwards in order to discover the ‘political unconscious’ of filmic discourse—the transnational roots and condition of cinema. Transnational film studies have become a major paradigm in Chinese film studies, along with the models of Chinese national cinema, Chinese-language cinema, and Sinophone cinema. It shares certain assumptions with the other three paradigms but also has its own characteristics and differences. Transnational Chinese film studies have also evolved into a broader study of “transnational visuality.” Transnational visual culture includes feature film, documentary, video, digital media, and visual arts. This situation is especially relevant in the so-called ‘postcinema’ stage when the film medium, the platform of film circulation, and the venue of viewing have changed tremendously. There are also various forms of transnational films. For instance, there exist the commercial-global blockbuster, independent art-house film, and exilic transnational cinema. Transnational cinema emerges and flourishes in the age and condition of globalization and transnational capitalism. However, this does not mean that transnational cinema necessarily serves the interests of transnational capitalism. Such a cinema can be liberating and counterhegemonic as well, depending on the particular situation.

Rural geographies and the New Chinese Cinemas: Imaging progressive places in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind and Jia Zhangke’s Platform

The New Chinese Cinemas were unprecedented in critiquing official narratives of progress through dramatic location-shot images of rural Taiwan and China. Much more than standing in as a picturesque backdrop, the rural was a site of complex ideological contestations. Yet, existing scholarship overlooks the richness of rural representations, reductively interpreting rural films as works of nostalgia and cultural salvage. Through a comparative analysis of representations of landscape, travel and visual perception in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986) and Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000), this article brings into focus the important but largely ignored roles that Hou and Jia have played in envisioning new frameworks for thinking about rural geographies. Drawing from Doreen Massey’s notion of the ‘progressive place’, I investigate how Jiufen and Fenyang – the films’ shooting locations – are stages upon which the directors experimented with imaging and imagining communities. Jiufen is represented in Dust as a porous interface between the urban and rural, a metonym for the film’s representation of Taiwan as a contact zone with China. Platform, by contrast, fashions an image of Fenyang as a non-place, a microcosm of China as it undergoes unchecked neo-liberal development. Significantly, these films went beyond revising rural imaginaries on-screen, to making a material impact on Jiufen and Fenyang by transforming them into landmarks of global film tourism. This work demonstrates how Hou and Jia responded to disorienting social changes not by resisting, but by tactically embracing the blurring of divides between the urban and rural, and local and global.