SENIOR FELLOW
Assistant Professor Weihong Bao
Februar - Juli 2012
Weihong Bao ist Assistant Professorin für Chinesischen Film und Medienkultur an der Columbia University, New York. Sie war Fellow am Getty Research Institute und am Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies an der Harvard University. Zur ihren Forschungsgebieten gehören das chinesische Kino, Drama und die visuelle Kultur von der Qing-Dynastie bis heute, Filmgeschichte und –theorie, Intermedialität. Zu ihren Publikationen zählen Baptism by Fire: Aesthetic Affect and Spectatorship in Chinese Cinema from Shanghai to Chongqing, Chicago 2005, sowie Aufsätze zum Nachkriegskino in Shanghai, zur chinesischen Oper und zum chinesischen Stummfilm.
Forschungsschwerpunkte
Intermediality; affect; cinema; spectatorship; technology
Dances of Fire: Aesthetic Affect and the Intermediation of Chinese Cinema, 1884-1945
I. Project Overview
I will be revising my book manuscript, “Dances of Fire,” which provides a critical genealogy of spectatorial affect in Chinese film and media culture from the late nineteenth century to the mid 1940s. Documenting the changing patterns in which sensorial affect was evoked upon spectators through intermediality—the dynamic exchange between Chinese cinema and printed media, drama, wireless technology, and architecture—this book illustrates how affect was engineered through media technologies and their aesthetic interplay so as to mold distinct modes of perception and public experience in China’s intensive encounter with colonization, urban modernity, and war. Integrating early film studies, visual studies, and the archaeology of media, this book offers new insight into an international history of spectatorship, the aesthetics of intermediality, and media production of the public sphere. By excavating a “multimedia” history of Chinese cinema, it also questions the conception of cinema as a singular, fixed medium and throws into historical relief contemporary debates on “the end of cinema” and its replacement by digital media. Understanding affect as embodied sensation, perception, and sociality with potential for action, my book examines the reciprocal relationship between affect and media institutions in shaping historically specific modes of spectatorship, politicized perception, and the public sphere. I focus on three key issues of affect that draw attention to the medium, the presence of the spectators, and the social space of exhibition: 1) affect as a product of intermedial aesthetics—how cinema and historical “old” and “new” media conjured up spectatorial affect but also provided ways to mediate that experience and bring into consciousness the presence of the medium; 2) affect as technologies of spectatorship and politics of perception—how the interplay between media technology and media aesthetics exerted sensorial impact upon the spectators and radicalized visuality and perception; 3) affect as public sphere—how an array of intermedial aesthetics of affect created new modes of social interaction and thus new rubrics of the public sphere. To historicize these plural dimensions of affect, my book dwells on four moments in modern China and examines how various intermedial aesthetics capitalized on audiences’ affective response to bring forth distinct modes of spectatorship and sociality, specifically, immersion, resonance, transparency, and agitation. From the mid-1880s to the late 1910s, illustrated magazines, popular theater, and films shared an aesthetic of affect that combined seriality and visual shocks to create an embodied experience of virtual travel and an immersive visual environment. In the 1920s, the spectator’s body, instead of being enveloped by an overwhelming perceptual environment, emerged as a reinvented medium capable of sympathetic vibration. A resonant mode of spectatorship was cultivated in martial arts films, as the feverish action and dynamic editing on the screen assaulted spectators’ senses and induced an affective response at the same time as resonance was gaining new significance with the spread of wireless technology and practices of hypnotism. The spectator’s resonant body underwent reconstruction in the 1930s, when Chinese left-wing filmmakers and dramatists participated in a dual construction of transparent vision and affective engagement in molding a politicized spectatorial public. This interest in critical transparency was stimulated by a dynamic interaction with a “culture of glass” in which modernist architecture intersected with a commodity culture of display. The dual operation of penetrating perception and affective engagement ironically paved the way for a new mode of spectatorship in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Competing against the bombardment of war machines and an expansive communication network that placed spectators in perceptual crisis, propaganda cinema was institutionalized to agitate viewers in need of perceptual clarity with the potential for taking action. These practices of affective spectatorship, as I show, were not isolated developments but embedded in broader social and political discourses.
II. Critical Interventions and Contribution to the Humanities
In a broader context, “Dances of Fire” seeks to provide a historically grounded intervention into the recent “affective turn” across a variety of disciplines including anthropology, literary studies, art history, film studies, and new media theory. The growing tendency to valorize affect as an autonomous, natural given that has the radical power to transform society has to be tempered, I argue, by its political and ideological appropriations as shown in the China case. My book addresses this issue by examining how media production of affect in modern China was embedded in larger discourse networks to shape specific publics, but with ambivalent social promise. Conversing with recent scholarship on crowds and publics that extends our attention to the potential and indeterminacy of embodied social interaction and collectivity, I show that affect was actively theorized in 1920s China in the transnational traffic in literary modernism and political philosophy. In addition, I illustrate how affect was “intermediated” through media technologies and their dynamic interaction, not to reconfirm affect as a natural given but to examine the actual process of intermedial aesthetics through which affect was produced, circulated, and consumed. Further, affect was engineered not only through media technology but also by other technologies of the body at the intersection of psychology, biology, and spiritualist movements. By inquiring into the aesthetics of intermediality in the production of affect, my book also contributes to the intensifying discussion on the future of cinema and digital culture by providing a historically specific perspective outside the main focus on European and North American contexts. A growing literature on the archaeology of media has produced counternarratives against the teleological history of digital media by mapping “historical new media” in the broader discourse network of cultural form and modes of sociability. Parallel to this new development, in film studies, emerging research on intermediality seeks to integrate film history with multimedia history. This new development has not received the same attention in studies on modern China. Although a growing amount of scholarship has richly documented the rise of news media and visual culture, the collateral exchange between cinema and other media has yet to be thoroughly explored. My book redresses this lack by closely examining the exchange between Chinese cinema and other media. Questioning medium specificity as a natural given underlying the many teleological narratives, I inquire into its formation as an institutional product and uncover the alternative history of Chinese cinema’s intensive interaction with other media at both its moment of emergence and the height of its institutionalization in the 1920s, as well as its moments of reinvention in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, I investigate intermediality not simply in terms of formal aesthetics but also through the materiality of technology. These two aspects, the technological and formal binding of human sensorium, place spectatorial affect within a broader social network.
Forschungsschwerpunkte
Intermediality; affect; cinema; spectatorship; technology
IKKM Forschungsprojekt
Dances of Fire: Aesthetic Affect and the Intermediation of Chinese Cinema, 1884-1945
I. Project Overview
I will be revising my book manuscript, “Dances of Fire,” which provides a critical genealogy of spectatorial affect in Chinese film and media culture from the late nineteenth century to the mid 1940s. Documenting the changing patterns in which sensorial affect was evoked upon spectators through intermediality—the dynamic exchange between Chinese cinema and printed media, drama, wireless technology, and architecture—this book illustrates how affect was engineered through media technologies and their aesthetic interplay so as to mold distinct modes of perception and public experience in China’s intensive encounter with colonization, urban modernity, and war. Integrating early film studies, visual studies, and the archaeology of media, this book offers new insight into an international history of spectatorship, the aesthetics of intermediality, and media production of the public sphere. By excavating a “multimedia” history of Chinese cinema, it also questions the conception of cinema as a singular, fixed medium and throws into historical relief contemporary debates on “the end of cinema” and its replacement by digital media. Understanding affect as embodied sensation, perception, and sociality with potential for action, my book examines the reciprocal relationship between affect and media institutions in shaping historically specific modes of spectatorship, politicized perception, and the public sphere. I focus on three key issues of affect that draw attention to the medium, the presence of the spectators, and the social space of exhibition: 1) affect as a product of intermedial aesthetics—how cinema and historical “old” and “new” media conjured up spectatorial affect but also provided ways to mediate that experience and bring into consciousness the presence of the medium; 2) affect as technologies of spectatorship and politics of perception—how the interplay between media technology and media aesthetics exerted sensorial impact upon the spectators and radicalized visuality and perception; 3) affect as public sphere—how an array of intermedial aesthetics of affect created new modes of social interaction and thus new rubrics of the public sphere. To historicize these plural dimensions of affect, my book dwells on four moments in modern China and examines how various intermedial aesthetics capitalized on audiences’ affective response to bring forth distinct modes of spectatorship and sociality, specifically, immersion, resonance, transparency, and agitation. From the mid-1880s to the late 1910s, illustrated magazines, popular theater, and films shared an aesthetic of affect that combined seriality and visual shocks to create an embodied experience of virtual travel and an immersive visual environment. In the 1920s, the spectator’s body, instead of being enveloped by an overwhelming perceptual environment, emerged as a reinvented medium capable of sympathetic vibration. A resonant mode of spectatorship was cultivated in martial arts films, as the feverish action and dynamic editing on the screen assaulted spectators’ senses and induced an affective response at the same time as resonance was gaining new significance with the spread of wireless technology and practices of hypnotism. The spectator’s resonant body underwent reconstruction in the 1930s, when Chinese left-wing filmmakers and dramatists participated in a dual construction of transparent vision and affective engagement in molding a politicized spectatorial public. This interest in critical transparency was stimulated by a dynamic interaction with a “culture of glass” in which modernist architecture intersected with a commodity culture of display. The dual operation of penetrating perception and affective engagement ironically paved the way for a new mode of spectatorship in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Competing against the bombardment of war machines and an expansive communication network that placed spectators in perceptual crisis, propaganda cinema was institutionalized to agitate viewers in need of perceptual clarity with the potential for taking action. These practices of affective spectatorship, as I show, were not isolated developments but embedded in broader social and political discourses.
II. Critical Interventions and Contribution to the Humanities
In a broader context, “Dances of Fire” seeks to provide a historically grounded intervention into the recent “affective turn” across a variety of disciplines including anthropology, literary studies, art history, film studies, and new media theory. The growing tendency to valorize affect as an autonomous, natural given that has the radical power to transform society has to be tempered, I argue, by its political and ideological appropriations as shown in the China case. My book addresses this issue by examining how media production of affect in modern China was embedded in larger discourse networks to shape specific publics, but with ambivalent social promise. Conversing with recent scholarship on crowds and publics that extends our attention to the potential and indeterminacy of embodied social interaction and collectivity, I show that affect was actively theorized in 1920s China in the transnational traffic in literary modernism and political philosophy. In addition, I illustrate how affect was “intermediated” through media technologies and their dynamic interaction, not to reconfirm affect as a natural given but to examine the actual process of intermedial aesthetics through which affect was produced, circulated, and consumed. Further, affect was engineered not only through media technology but also by other technologies of the body at the intersection of psychology, biology, and spiritualist movements. By inquiring into the aesthetics of intermediality in the production of affect, my book also contributes to the intensifying discussion on the future of cinema and digital culture by providing a historically specific perspective outside the main focus on European and North American contexts. A growing literature on the archaeology of media has produced counternarratives against the teleological history of digital media by mapping “historical new media” in the broader discourse network of cultural form and modes of sociability. Parallel to this new development, in film studies, emerging research on intermediality seeks to integrate film history with multimedia history. This new development has not received the same attention in studies on modern China. Although a growing amount of scholarship has richly documented the rise of news media and visual culture, the collateral exchange between cinema and other media has yet to be thoroughly explored. My book redresses this lack by closely examining the exchange between Chinese cinema and other media. Questioning medium specificity as a natural given underlying the many teleological narratives, I inquire into its formation as an institutional product and uncover the alternative history of Chinese cinema’s intensive interaction with other media at both its moment of emergence and the height of its institutionalization in the 1920s, as well as its moments of reinvention in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, I investigate intermediality not simply in terms of formal aesthetics but also through the materiality of technology. These two aspects, the technological and formal binding of human sensorium, place spectatorial affect within a broader social network.