Weihong Bao (University of California, Berkeley)
Although the Chinese terms for “cinema” in its first two decades varied historically and differed by regions and practices, existing historiographies have privileged shadow play (yingxi) as the indigenous conception of cinema by associating it with the theatrical tradition of popular entertainment and selective scenes in film exhibition. This is recently challenged by new scholarship that finds evidence to highlight the photographic association with cinema in the early reception of cinema in China, hence moving away from an ethnic and cultural exoticist notion to a more globally shared understanding of cinematic ontology that anchors its specificity to the photographic medium and the scene of projection.
Yet, between the shadow play ontology that seeks the “theatrical” roots of cinema in China and the photoplay ontology that traces a “pictorial” conception of cinema to embrace the foreignness and technological specificity of cinema, my essay suggests a third approach by pointing out the shadowy status of “picture” and “play” behind these ontologies. In other words, I question the very assumptions of medium that sustain such polar positions in the first place. The dichotomy between theater and photography, indigenous tradition and foreign technology, I argue, revolves around the assumptions of medium as singular and fixed and anchors the specificity of a medium on its material technology. Instead, my essay shifts the inquiry of the medium from fixed materiality to interconnected cultural practices that questions the static notion of a medium and place. This approach seeks to open up the space for a more nuanced understanding of the scene of cinema’s introduction in China by exploring medium and place as systems of environment involving various cultural forces at play.
This inquiry is enabled by a critical rethinking of place that urges me to trace an alternative route and dynamic of transnational traffic beyond the usual attention to the unidirectional traffic between the West/Hollywood and China. I investigate how both the status of “picture” and “play” had transformed profoundly and became increasingly entwined at the historical moments immediately before and after the introduction of cinema to China. I will look at how a particular kind of painting served as the backdrop for photography studio and stage, making photography a mini stage of performance and the play performed pictures. These paintings also travelled regionally and transnationally across China, East and Southeast Asia, and America, making them “motion” pictures before and after cinema. These interconnections between and transformations of photography, painting, and performance invite us to revisit the “theatrical” or “pictorial” ontologies of cinema. They also shaped the very ways by which cinema was conceived and experienced in those early days in and outside China. By looking at the cultural scene around and beyond cinema, I consider how these discursive and cultural practices embedded cinema in a complex system of media that induced their mutual transformations. They also collaborated in creating a new spatial imaginary, or media environment, in and out of China, for both cultural consumptions and political mobilization.
Weihong Bao is associate professor of film and media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize for 2016. She has published widely on silent cinema, transnational film and media theory, historical and contemporary documentary in China, and theory and practice of propaganda in journals such as Camera Obscura, New German Critique, Representations, and The Journal of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. She co-edits The Journal of Chinese Cinemas as well as the book series “Film Theory in Media History” for Amsterdam University Press. Current research topics include the geopolitics of film theory, the historical relationship between film and theater, and cultural constructions of secrecy as media theory and history.