Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 479 pp. (Figures.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-8134-1.
Weihong Bao’s Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 is a groundbreaking work that sets a new bar for scholarship in the field. Combining bold theoretical arguments, sharp critical observations, and meticulous archival research, this is the single most important book to be published in the field of pre-1949 Chinese film studies since Zhang Zhen’s An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1986–1937, a decade earlier.
Like many great books, it is hard to boil down Fiery Cinema to a single theme or argument as this is a complex, multi-faceted work that simultaneously engages with several important theoretical questions, and does so from a variety of perspectives. At its heart is the concept of “fiery cinema,” which Bao plays with in a variety of ways—from the fire scenes that come at the climax of numerous martial arts films to the fiery emotions that films and stage dramas incite in viewers—as a thematic hub to tie the chapters together. Linked to this notion of “fiery cinema” is the argument that Chinese film of this period is what Bao coins an affective medium, which the author describes as “a distinct conception of medium as a mediating environment, in contrast to the currently dominant understanding of medium as a vehicle of information transmission according to an epistolary communication model—predicated on divisions between the sender, the receiver, and the message. The affective medium connotes a new conception of medium, space, and spectatorial body, as well as the entwinement of media in a dynamic ecology. The affective medium also heightens affect as a shared social space in commercial and political mass publics” (7–8).
In many ways Fiery Cinema is not just about film, instead it is about the intersections of cinema and print culture, stage dramas, photography, radio, architecture, and, most significantly, its affective impact on audiences. By partially detaching Chinese film studies from its traditionally text-based foundations, Bao allows for a more nuanced, layered, and complex understanding for how the entity known as “cinema” was constructed, functioned, and interacted with spectators both on screen and off. The book excavates seldom-studied filmic texts, going so far as to re-animate several examples of “lost cinema” that are no longer extant. While the challenge of carrying out in-depth research on lost films would turn away many scholars, Bao uses this limitation to her advantage and offers an innovative research approach, rescuing these and other lost pages of Chinese cinema history.
Fiery Cinema is divided into three parts: Resonance, Transparency, and Agitation, each of which features two chapters. Resonance, which Bao describes as “a tangible topos of the 1920s concerning the aesthetic and technological attunement of the spectator’s body in cultivating a sensorial field of social experience as an affective medium” (32), is used as a framework to examine the rise of martial arts films through new perspectives on physiology and technology. Chapters 1 and 2, “Fiery Action: Toward an Aesthetics of New Heroism” and “A Culture of Resonance: Hypnotism, Wireless Cinema, and the Invention of Intermedial Spectatorship,” explore the interactions and negotiations between early Chinese martial arts films, Western serialized dramas, and Chinese stage plays before going on to bring wireless technology and hypnotism into the fold. Part 2, Transparency, explores the seemingly divergent areas of left-wing film, architecture, and sound film, yet manages to bring these themes together in creative and surprising ways. Chapters 3 and 4, “Dances of Fire: Mediating Affective Immediacy” and “Transparent Shanghai: Cinema, Architecture, and a Left-Wing Culture of Glass,” feature readings of dramatist Tian Han’s Dances of Fire (1929) and the rise of wireless technology and architecture under the rubric of a new modernist “culture of glass.” With Agitation, the third and final section, Bao turns to the era of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), exploring the entanglements between cinema and propaganda. Chapters 5 and 6, “A Vibrating Art in the Air: The Infinite Cinema and the Media Ensemble of Propaganda” and “Baptism by Fire: Atmospheric War, Agitation, and a Tale of Three Cities,” offer some of the most thoughtful scholarship ever published on the Chinese film industry’s war-time relocation to Chongqing and its eventual geographical (and ideological) split between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Chongqing. With each section spanning roughly a decade of modern Chinese history, Bao also unveils a stirring portrait of how media culture transformed during the tumultuous early Republican years leading up to the war with Japan.
Throughout this study Bao consistently offers deep and challenging engagements with Chinese cultural history and Western theory (coining several useful theoretical concepts of her own along the way), offers penetrating readings of several important films including Orphan of the Storm (1929), New Women (1934), and Scenes of City Life (1935), and, most importantly, reconstructs “cinema” as an affective medium. Weihong Bao’s Fiery Cinema stands as an impressive study that is destined to become required reading for scholars working in the fields of film and media studies and modern Chinese cultural studies. In a sea of formulaic academic monographs this is one of those rare books that changes the formula and breaks the mold.
Michael Berry
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
pp. 890-892