Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915 1945
Weihong Bao's Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China 1915 1945 innovatively combines a rigorously researched history of cinema in early 20th century China with audacious theorizations on reception and spectatorship, affect theory, and media genealogy. Bao's ambitious study aims to integrate elusive dynamics and intangible materials into a historical reconstruction of Chinese cinema's numerous permutations from the silent era to World War II. While performing close readings of contemporary media theory, Chinese film reviews and journals, and key sequences of surviving films, posters and photographs, Bao also teases out the impact of discourses and practices infrequently seen as cinematic. Her case studies, in fact, cover an eclectic range of objects and contexts including irretrievably lost films, affective and somatic structures of experience, hypnotism, peep shows, glass architecture, and performative displays of destruction. Consequently, while this study is firmly entrenched within contemporary academic discourses on modern China, Bao's innovative and exacting rethinking of key categories of analysis in the humanities such as medium, affect, intermediality and spectatorship should resonate across a vast range of scholarly disciplines.