Victor Fan ambitiously opens up “film theory” as a set of problematics. How does one conduct a comparative dialogue between Euro-American film theory and Chinese film theory without perpetuating a colonial mode of knowledge production? To what end does one seek a comparative space, other than claiming, “China too has theory!” (p. 7). What does “theory” (lilun) mean and how is it different from “criticism” (pinglun) in the context of the institutionalization of film studies as an academic discipline? What is particularly “Chinese” about Chinese film theory and how do we (dis)locate “Chineseness”? These are the provocative questions that Fan pursues throughout his study.
Cinema Approaching Reality is divided into five chapters, each of which locates the ontology of Chinese cinema by tracing the itinerancy of a key term in Chinese film discourse: bizhen (approaching reality), yishi (consciousness), jiezou (rhythm), xuanxiang (suspension-imagination), and xieyi (sketching ideation). Each chapter begins with a close reading of a key term, supported by archival research, and concludes in a comparative dialogue that brings a key term to contemporary relevance in the digital age.
In titling his work Cinema Approaching Reality, Fan takes up the term bizhen from the essays written by Gu Kenfu and Hou Yao in the early 1920s. For Fan, the term bizhen, which refers not to mimesis but to the temporal distance between the cinematographic image and reality, captures the ontology of Chinese cinema—and this is where it coincides with Bazinian ontology. In debunking the myth of incommensurability between China and the West, Fan locates a common aporia between the cinematographic image and reality that many film theorists wrestled with. Fan argues that bizhen opens up in the sensorium of the spectators a shared affective state as a site of potentiality.
Fan looks at how bizhen is reconfigured in political terms in the Marxist turn of Chinese film theory in the 1930s. Taking Lenin's differentiation between spontaneous consciousness and revolutionary consciousness as a theoretical springboard, Fan traces the itinerancy of the term yishi (consciousness) as it was translated from the Japanese original term mokuteki ishiki. Fan poignantly demonstrates how, through the translation of Lu Xun, yishi became a “pluralistic semantic field” as the concept was taken up by Shen Xiling and critics writing for the Star Monthly, who argued that cinema has the potential to “redefine the consciousness of its spectators” (pp. 44, 49).
Fan discusses how soft film theorists conceived cinema as an aesthetic experience and a biomimetic technology that negotiated three kinds of life: human life (rensheng), biological life (shengtai), and political life (minsheng). Soft film theorists believed that educating the masses cannot be done rhetorically, but must be done as a kind of jiaohua (inculcation through immersion) by instrumentalizing cinematic rhythm (formal rhythm), which would be perceived by spectators as a natural rhythm—an inner rhythm intrinsic to the human body (p. 92).
Fan takes up the ontological and ethical dimensions of Fey Mou's film theory by highlighting three key terms in Fey's writing: xuanxiang (suspension-imagination), kongqi (air/atmosphere), and ren (benevolence/human). Fan demonstrates how Fey's camera fluidly carves out a “trace of desire,” which is not overtly conveyed by dramatic actions but by subtle glances and bodily gestures (p. 128). What the cinematographic image captures, Fan argues, is the potentiality of desire: “time, life, and desire—as variations of potentiality—emerge and manifest as an imagination, a virtual image that is in the process of informing” (p. 122).
Fan's last chapter refreshingly dislocates the “Chineseness” of Chinese film theory by highlighting the plurality of Chinese cinema that is often concealed by the nation (and Mandarin as the national language) as a privileged site of analysis. Fan takes up the early Cantonese sound film (1930–49) as a case study. As Fan points out, in the Canton–Hong Kong region, “the term for watching a motion picture is the same as for watching a Cantonese play: taihei” (p. 156). Fan argues that the backbone of Cantonese theater and Cantonese sound cinema is not its wenben (literary script) but its yueben (musical score), because they were developed out of an auditory tradition that approaches reality not by means of describing it (xieshi) but by sketching ideation (xieyi) (pp. 166–69). Fan's superb visual and musical analyses demonstrate how musical notations and manipulations inform performers’ choreography and staging (in relation to the camera). The absence of shot-reverse-shot and the use of long and medium-long shots preserve the integrity of musical performance, allowing music to engender qing as an affective state. In highlighting the musical and ideational aspects of early Cantonese sound film, Fan carves out a space for Cantonese cinema that co-existed in tension with its Shanghai and Hollywood counterparts.
Fan is to be commended for broadening and opening up the emerging canon of Chinese film theory as a contested and pluralistic sphere. What remains to be done is locating Chinese film theory—its emergence, repression, and permutations—in the Mao era in a new socialist culture of criticism and self-criticism.
