Fiery Cinema is a diligently researched and persuasively argued monograph that fundamentally changes the paradigm of the studies of Chinese cinema and media. Ever since the 1990s, film scholars have debated the way pre-1949 Chinese cinema is understood in the context of the larger intellectual environment and vernacular culture. Yet, most of these works presuppose that cinema, as a mechanical, social and cultural apparatus, has been constituted since the mid-1920s as an institution that occupies a privileged position in the public sphere. In this book, Weihong Bao reconsiders the cinematic experience as a medium that occupies an intersection among various modes of mediation of human perception and affect, including the theatre, print culture, photography, sound, architecture, scientific discourse, television and radio. By (re)locating cinema to a set of complex intermedial relationships, and by identifying a thematic strand – fire – that runs through these critical discourses, Bao illuminates new angles of understanding how cinema emerged as an affective medium that constantly responded to the shifting ideological apparatus (dispositif) of Republican China (1911–49).

For Bao, fire itself was considered a medium that channels and remediates affects in accordance with the topoi – discursive and experiential modalities shared in a public space – of the times: resonance, transparency and agitation (p. 30). In the 1920s, it was understood as a medium that would transfer affective responses from one body to another, thus producing synesthetic vibrations in a process called gongming (resonance). On the representational level, fire is featured in numerous stage and film productions as a spectacle, and it serves a metaphor for what Henri Bergson would call élan vital (life force), an idea introduced and popularized during the May Fourth period (c. 1919–23). When combined with the mathematically calculated and physically agile dongzuo (action) and jiqiao (technology) of an actor's performance in the martial arts genre, fire can actively innervate the spectators' sensoria. Consequently, the spectators' bodies would generate the same form of vibration as the larger mediated environment's – a process frequently called anshi (suggestion), named after the philosophy of Japanese thinker Kuriyagawa Hakuson (pp. 52–75).

In the imagination of the cultural critics of the 1920s, photographic, cinematic and televisual technologies were all understood as media which put their spectators under a trance (pp. 93–104) that would allow them to undergo bodily experiences beyond their physical and geographical limits (p. 126). Once institutionalized, these media can train the physical body into a technological body that produces resonance (pp. 126–37), and can therefore be instrumentalized as educational tools. After the Manchurian incident on 18 September 1931, under the influence of European and Soviet film theories and Marxist cultural theories, Shanghai filmmakers and critics began to believe in the concept of cinema's medium specificity. For these filmmakers, the delineation between on-screen and off-screen spaces and the juxtaposition of sound and image through montage were effective tools for them to foreground the dialectical relationships between social classes and gendered positions (pp. 153–96). In fact, “left-wing” filmmaking and theories, often regarded as the polar opposite of their “soft film” counterparts with their emphasis on film contents and political consciousness, are in fact highly interested in film aesthetics. Left-wing filmmakers modelled cinema on the modern glass architecture, with its own architectural structure of montage that would allow the spectators to observe and reflect upon intricate social relationships under the capitalist system (pp. 197–261).

Medium specificity then gave way to a new form of intermediality in the 1940s, as the film industry, as a result of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), moved to Chongqing. For many wartime filmmakers and media theorists, cinema, radio and television had the ability to construct and instill a specific knowledge in the excitable bodies of the spectators or listeners, and would eventually incite passion and generate fire through the ether, thus producing a mass audience and agitating it to take political actions (pp. 265–374). In this sense, fire served as a discursive constant between the 1920s and 1940s, yet what it stood for and what it was supposed to do shifted in accordance with the larger dispositif of the society.

Fiery Cinema is undoubtedly one of the most important books published on Chinese cinema and media in recent years. It suggests many new possibilities for scholars to rethink how one can historicize and re-conceptualize Chinese cinema and its theoretical discourse during the Republican period. It also offers inspiration for scholars, researchers and students who are interested in cinema and media studies at large, as it demonstrates not only what the author has found out, but what more we have yet to find out.