Berry, Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures, 55–56.
Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 201.
Zhang and Li, “Tan dianying yuyan de xiandaihua,” 46.
See esp. Bazin’s essays “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation” and “The Evolution of Film Language” in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 87–106, 215–49. (Gray, 1:23–40, 2:16–40.)
Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor, 202.
David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002): 16, and Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 122.
For example, two of Zhang Yimou’s most well-known earlier films—Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang 红高粱; 1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (Da hong denglong gaogao gua 大红灯笼高高挂; 1991)—both had ASLs of around ten seconds, while two of his most famous later films—Hero and House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu 十面埋伏; 2004)—had much lower ASLs of around four seconds. (Statistics taken from the Cinemetrics Databas, https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/database.php.)
André Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” 101. (Gray, 36.)
André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” 76.
Andrew Chan, “Interview: Jia Zhangke,” Film Comment (March–April 2009), https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jia-zhangke-interview.
Chris Berry, “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By,” in Chinese Films in Focus II, 250–57.
Moira Weigel, “Slow Wars: Is This How Cinema Transcends Itself?,” n+1, no. 25 (Spring 2016), https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/essays/slow-wars.
See David Bordwell’s definitive chapter on “parametric narration” in Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 274–310.
Notable examples include The Opium War (Yapian zhanzheng 鸦片战争; Xie Jin 谢晋, 1997), The Founding of a Republic (Jianguo daye 建国大业; Huang Jianxin 黄建新 and Han Sanping 韩三平, 2009), The Founding of an Army (Jianjun daye 建军大业; Andrew Lau 刘伟强, 2017), and Operation Red Sea (Hong Hai xingdong 红海行动; Dante Lam 林超贤, 2018).
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2009).
Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 214.
Schudson, 215.
Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 292. For a more recent study of these kinds of advertising images and their dubious utopianism (although it does not use the term “capitalist realism”), see Meiqin Wang, “Advertising the Chinese Dream: Urban Billboards and Ni Weihua’s Documentary Photography,” China Information 29, no. 2 (2015): 176–201.
For an extensive reading of the character of Du Lala as an “exemplary model” for the market age, reminiscent of those of the Mao era, see Marco Fumian, “Chronicle of Du Lala’s Promotion: Exemplary Literature, the Middle Class, and the Socialist Market,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2016): 78–128. For a critique of the film’s “neoliberal feminist ideology,” see Su-lin Yu, “The Rise of the Neoliberal Chinese Female Subject in Go Lala Go,” Comparative Literature and Culture 20, no. 6 (2018), https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol20/iss6/3/.
Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image, 201.
Jakobson, Language in Literature, 22.
Shelley Kracier, “Finding Ways to Fit: Mainland Chinese Films at Toronto and Vancouver,” dGenerate Films, November 18, 2009, http://dgeneratefilms.com/tag/shelly-kraicer/.
Giovacchini and Sklar, Global Neorealism, 11.
7. Chinese Cinematic Realism(s) in the Digital Age
The earliest known film produced in China was the silent opera film Dingjun Mountain (Dingjun Shan 定军山; Ren Qingtai 任慶泰, 1905), no copies of which remain today.
For extensive discussion of Hero, see Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley, eds., Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of “Hero” (London: Routledge, 2010).
Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time; Mulvey, Death 24x a Second; Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film.
For detailed studies of this parody video, see Xiao Liu, “Small Videos, Hu Ge Impact: Parody Videos in Post-Socialist China,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 4, no. 3 (2010): 229–44, and Haomin Gong and Xin Yang, “Digitized Parody: The Politics of Egao in Contemporary China,” China Information f24, no. 1 (2010): 3–26.
Chen Xihe, “Xuni xianshizhuyi he houdianying lilun” [Virtual realism and post-filmic theory], originally published in Dangdai dianying [Contemporary cinema], no. 2 (2001): 84–88. The essay is collected as the final entry in the authoritative Bainian Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan [Selected works of one hundred years of Chinese film theory], ed. Ding Yaping (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2002), 2:720–36. Here I will cite the original article. Translations are my own.
Chen, 86.
Chen, 87.
Rosen, Change Mummified, 303.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 300.
Manovich, 295.
In an interview included as a special feature on the film’s international DVD release (Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2010), director John Woo confirms that for most of the shot, the bird, the ships, and the river are all “CG’d.” According to Wu, his producer warned him that it may be the most expensive shot in film history, helping to make Red Cliff the highest-budget film ever produced in Asia up to that time.
See Tobey Crockett, “The ‘Camera as Camera’: How CGI Changes the World as We Know It,” in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, ed. Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb, 1:117–39 (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).
For an enlightening contribution to this debate, see Lisa Purse, “Working Space: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) and the Digital Long Take,” in The Long Take: Critical Approaches, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 221–37 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Stephen Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly 49, no. 3 (1996): 28. See also Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
Prince, “True Lies,” 28.
Prince, 34.
Terry Gross, “Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen on Singing Cowboys and Working with Oxen,” Fresh Air (podcast), November 19, 2018, https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/11/19/669152874.
It should be noted that Gu Kenfu’s claim is questionable in the first place, because even in classical cinema, it was always possible to use stunt doubles, editing, or compositing techniques like rear projection to depict characters doing things that the actors playing them were not actually doing themselves.
Zhang Nuanxin and Li Tuo, “Tan dianying yuyan de xiandaihua” [On the modernization of film language], Dianying yishu [Film art], no. 3 (1979): 40.
Yomi Braester, “The Spectral Return of Cinema: Globalization and Cinephilia in Contemporary Chinese Film,” Cinema Journal 55, no. 1 (2015): 31.
Paola Voci, China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities (London: Routledge, 2010), 39; http://animation.bfa.edu.cn/.
Michael Raine, “Adaptation as ‘Transcultural Mimesis’ in Japanese Cinema,” in Miyao, Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, 101–23.
Vivian Lee, “Virtual Bodies, Flying Objects: The Digital Imaginary in Contemporary Martial Arts Films,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2007): 10.
Ying Zhu, “Has Chinese Film Finally Produced a Real Hero?,” ChinaFile, August 18, 2015, http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/culture/has-chinese-film-finally-produced-real-hero.
See Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), 114–51, and Sean Macdonald, Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media (London: Routledge, 2016), 78–104.
Julie A. Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 267–69.
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 165.
Williams, “Melodrama Revised.”
Williams, 60–61.
Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, 47–74.
Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 66–67.
Interestingly, whereas the sacrifice of the individual to the collective in The Wandering Earth is final, in Interstellar, following his plunge into a black hole, the hero gets to reappear, completely unharmed, in a hospital to be reunited with his estranged daughter, with the film making little attempt to explain this good fortune.
Crockett, “Camera as Camera,” 118.
Roger F. Cook, Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 169.
Turnock, Plastic Reality, 268.
Turnock, 269.
For a detailed study of the contemporary relationship between Hollywood and China, see Aynne Kokas, Hollywood Made in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 117.
Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 31.
Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index?,” 24–25.
Scott Curtis, “Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics,” in Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 246.
Rosen, Change Mummified, 307.
Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 47.
Rosen, Change Mummified, 307.
Luke Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 109–10.
Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, introduction to Berry et al., New Chinese Documentary Film Movement, 9.
Berry and Rofel, 10.
Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 36.
On hypermediacy, see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 51.
Sumanth Gopinath, The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 235.
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 90–91.
Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 57.
Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 42.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 69, 73–74.
Tonglin Lu, “Trapped Freedom and Localized Globalism,” in From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, ed. Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 126.
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 99–100.
For a lengthier discussion of these films and others depicting the Three Gorges project in some way, see Jason McGrath, “The Cinema of Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam in Feature Film and Video,” in Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, by Wu Hung with Jason McGrath and Stephanie Smith, 33–46 (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2008).
These details of production were related by the director when he was present for a screening at the Hong Kong Science Museum in March 2013 during the Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 7. (Gray, 13.)
Ling Zhang, “Foreshadowing the Future of Capitalism: Surveillance Technology and Digital Realism in Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes (2017),” Comparative Cinema 8, no. 14 (2020): 66.
Conclusion
Aaron Stewart, “Interview: Director Bi Gan Talks ‘Kaili Blues,’ the Influence of Tarkovsky, Sleeping through Movies & More,” The Playlist, May 27, 2016, https://theplaylist.net/.
Time travel within a single shot is not unique either to this film or to contemporary digital cinema. Daniel Morgan gives several examples of it going back decades in his The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 18–19.
For an insightful close reading of the film’s poetics, see Jiwei Xiao and Dudley Andrew, “Poetics and the Periphery: The Journey of Kaili Blues (Web Exclusive),” Cineaste 44, no. 3 (2019), https://www.cineaste.com/summer2019/poetics-and-periphery-journey-of-kaili-blues.
The film’s English subtitles translate these lines more prosaically as “It is impossible to retain a past thought, to seize a future thought, and even to hold onto [sic] a present thought.”
“#78—‘Neon Bull’/‘Kaili Blues,’” Film at Lincoln Center Podcast, 2016, https://soundcloud.com/filmlinc/78-neon-bull-kaili-blues.
Stewart, “Interview.”
Bi Gan explains the shooting process in the Film at Lincoln Center Podcast cited in note 5.
“Bi Gan with Ethan Spigland,” Brooklyn Rail, April 2019, https://brooklynrail.org/2019/04/film/In-Conversation-BI-GAN-with-Ethan-Spigland.
Lutz Koepnick, The Long Take: Cinema and the Wondrous (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 44–45.
Koepnick, 45, 189.
Koepnick, 22.
Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 44.
Maxim Gorky, “Life Devoid of Words: Maxim Gorky Witnesses the Dawn of Film,” Lapham’s Quarterly 3, no. 2 (2010), https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/arts-letters/life-devoid-words.
Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 44.
Perez, Material Ghost, 21. Gunning, too, rejects “the nonsensical position that we take the cinema image for reality, that we are involved in a hallucination or ‘illusion’ of reality.” Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 44.
Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 45.
John Mullarkey, “Life, Movement and the Fabulation of the Event,” Theory, Culture, and Society 24, no. 6 (2007): 59.
Mullarkey, 61, 57. Emphasis original.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 30, 32.
Ghosh, 33.