Approaching Reality: Epistemic Distance, Political Crises and Temporal Imaginations in the Sino-French Dialogue on Cinema Ontology

TY - JOUR

T1 - Approaching Reality

T2 - Epistemic Distance, Political Crises and Temporal Imaginations in the Sino-French Dialogue on Cinema Ontology

AU - Fan, Ho Lok Victor

PY - 2012

Y1 - 2012

N2 - In recent years, an increasing number of film scholars have become interested in setting up a dialogue between Bazinian ontology and a similar line of discussions among the Shanghai filmmakers and critics of the 1920s. Such a desire to open up a comparative space in cinema ontology is motivated by a growing interest among film scholars in those theoretical traditions “outside” the Euro-American “canon,” and by a hope to find inspirations “elsewhere” to reconfigure the established notion of cinema ontology in response to the digital image. Yet, how we conduct a dialogue and to what end we do so are precarious problems. It is because the idea of searching for a conceptual alternative in a discourse outside Europe and America is often based on the assumption that “China” and the “West” are fundamentally different, and in the end, instead of putting two bodies of knowledge into conversation, scholars sometimes inadvertently reproduce an imagined epistemic distance by too eagerly asserting their differences. In addition, by holding Bazinian ontology as the golden standard, it is often tempting to use the Chinese film theoretical writings to “improve” Bazin or vice versa, instead of locating possible blind spots that are shared by these two seemingly distantiated discussions—aporias that might in fact help us work through the “digital” problem by addressing certain theoretical limits within the historical imagination in the first half of the 20th century.Attempts to make Bazin talk to the Shanghai film critics of the 1920s came to the fore in the mid-1980s. Between 1985 and 1986, two film scholars from Beijing, Chen Xihe (b. 1949) and Zhong Dafeng (b. 1955), set out to find an alternative concept of ontology specific to the history of Chinese cinema. “Does China have its own system of film theory?” asked Chen. “In comparison with the state of theoretical discourses in the West, is the state of theoretical discourses in China complete? If incomplete, in what sense is it incomplete? Can we follow another specific logic to understand the state of theoretical discourses in China?”1 In an attempt to answer these questions, Chen and Zhong argued that the Chinese thinking on cinema ontology was not based on the image as reality, but on the relationship between drama, representation and life.2 At the time, this series of questions sounded exciting: It would be too good to be true if we could identify a notion of cinema ontology alternative to the one built upon Bazin’s writings.3 Yet, the desire to find a theoretical alternative in the name of opening a comparative space is based on an ethnological assumption that “China” is posited outside the rest of the “World,” as though these two cultural discourses, no matter how closely they converse with each other, are fundamentally discreet. Hence, despite the fact that Chen and Zhong managed to construct a whole system of ontological thinking out of the theoretical writings from the 1920s, what their discussion does is simply maintain the imaginary distance between China and the World.4By focusing so much on building an epistemic distance between China and the imagined West, Chen, Zhong and a whole generation of film theorists who worked along this line missed a potentially more interesting difference between Bazinian ontology and the early film thinking among the Shanghai critics: the latter’s insistence on a delicate distance between the cinematographic image and reality. In many film theoretical writings in the 1920s, critics have the tendency to use a peculiar term to describe cinematographic reality: bizhen—often translated as “lifelike,” but more properly understood as “approaching reality.” This ambiguously defined term is useful for us not only because it hints at the fact that the Shanghai film critics of the early 20th century were, after all, equally interested in the question of reality as Bazin and his French predecessors (that is, the whole generation of photogénie writers before him). But it is also interesting because the distance between the image and reality that such a line of thought adamantly maintains stands to challenge the confidence of Bazin—and to different degrees, the philosophers to whom he was indebted, including Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)—in believing that the perceiving subject (in our case, the spectator) apprehends the image-consciousness in its totality and immediacy.5 What I shall demonstrate is that the term “approaching reality” suggests a certain gap between a spectator’s affective state and the image-consciousness it apprehends, a gap that may contain within itself multiple potentialities in the way the spectator is put into a relationship with time.How we should approach this distance and the epistemic difference it implies is a serious problem. On the one hand, it is tempting to read our new discovery with the Bazinian paradigm and try to prove that above all, these historical theories could be reconfigured in accordance with the critical language to which we are accustomed. On the other hand, it is equally tempting to simply use the Shanghai film theory as a tool to improve Bazin. What I want to do here is to take up a methodology proposed by Thomas Elsaesser: seeing each historical attempt to propose a theory of cinema ontology as the symptom of a crisis—be that cinematic, sociopolitical or philosophical. In so doing, I can map that crisis onto our current crisis of thinking cinematographic reality in relation to the digital image. What I suggest here—as Elsaesser did—is not that the digital image has actively transformed the ontology of the moving image, but that it inspires us to think “retrospectively” and “retroactively” that the way we used to define cinema was in itself limited by certain historical imaginations. Perhaps more importantly, by acknowledging that it is possible to doubt the line of film theoretical thinking that led towards the intellectual environment that nurtures Bazin’s film thinking—i.e. French phenomenology and the photogénie movement—and to locate the blind spot that both schools of ontology share, a new comparative space may emerge that can offer us further potential to rethink what cinema can be, that is, the cinema that “has not yet been invented.”6 In the intervention that follows, I argue that the very term “approaching reality” can offer us an insight into this gap between cinema spectators’ affective states and the image-consciousness they apprehend. It also reveals the historical limitations in our understanding of time beyond those terms as distance and boundary, beginning and end, progression and regression—temporal potentialities that are currently opened up by the digital image.

AB - In recent years, an increasing number of film scholars have become interested in setting up a dialogue between Bazinian ontology and a similar line of discussions among the Shanghai filmmakers and critics of the 1920s. Such a desire to open up a comparative space in cinema ontology is motivated by a growing interest among film scholars in those theoretical traditions “outside” the Euro-American “canon,” and by a hope to find inspirations “elsewhere” to reconfigure the established notion of cinema ontology in response to the digital image. Yet, how we conduct a dialogue and to what end we do so are precarious problems. It is because the idea of searching for a conceptual alternative in a discourse outside Europe and America is often based on the assumption that “China” and the “West” are fundamentally different, and in the end, instead of putting two bodies of knowledge into conversation, scholars sometimes inadvertently reproduce an imagined epistemic distance by too eagerly asserting their differences. In addition, by holding Bazinian ontology as the golden standard, it is often tempting to use the Chinese film theoretical writings to “improve” Bazin or vice versa, instead of locating possible blind spots that are shared by these two seemingly distantiated discussions—aporias that might in fact help us work through the “digital” problem by addressing certain theoretical limits within the historical imagination in the first half of the 20th century.Attempts to make Bazin talk to the Shanghai film critics of the 1920s came to the fore in the mid-1980s. Between 1985 and 1986, two film scholars from Beijing, Chen Xihe (b. 1949) and Zhong Dafeng (b. 1955), set out to find an alternative concept of ontology specific to the history of Chinese cinema. “Does China have its own system of film theory?” asked Chen. “In comparison with the state of theoretical discourses in the West, is the state of theoretical discourses in China complete? If incomplete, in what sense is it incomplete? Can we follow another specific logic to understand the state of theoretical discourses in China?”1 In an attempt to answer these questions, Chen and Zhong argued that the Chinese thinking on cinema ontology was not based on the image as reality, but on the relationship between drama, representation and life.2 At the time, this series of questions sounded exciting: It would be too good to be true if we could identify a notion of cinema ontology alternative to the one built upon Bazin’s writings.3 Yet, the desire to find a theoretical alternative in the name of opening a comparative space is based on an ethnological assumption that “China” is posited outside the rest of the “World,” as though these two cultural discourses, no matter how closely they converse with each other, are fundamentally discreet. Hence, despite the fact that Chen and Zhong managed to construct a whole system of ontological thinking out of the theoretical writings from the 1920s, what their discussion does is simply maintain the imaginary distance between China and the World.4By focusing so much on building an epistemic distance between China and the imagined West, Chen, Zhong and a whole generation of film theorists who worked along this line missed a potentially more interesting difference between Bazinian ontology and the early film thinking among the Shanghai critics: the latter’s insistence on a delicate distance between the cinematographic image and reality. In many film theoretical writings in the 1920s, critics have the tendency to use a peculiar term to describe cinematographic reality: bizhen—often translated as “lifelike,” but more properly understood as “approaching reality.” This ambiguously defined term is useful for us not only because it hints at the fact that the Shanghai film critics of the early 20th century were, after all, equally interested in the question of reality as Bazin and his French predecessors (that is, the whole generation of photogénie writers before him). But it is also interesting because the distance between the image and reality that such a line of thought adamantly maintains stands to challenge the confidence of Bazin—and to different degrees, the philosophers to whom he was indebted, including Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)—in believing that the perceiving subject (in our case, the spectator) apprehends the image-consciousness in its totality and immediacy.5 What I shall demonstrate is that the term “approaching reality” suggests a certain gap between a spectator’s affective state and the image-consciousness it apprehends, a gap that may contain within itself multiple potentialities in the way the spectator is put into a relationship with time.How we should approach this distance and the epistemic difference it implies is a serious problem. On the one hand, it is tempting to read our new discovery with the Bazinian paradigm and try to prove that above all, these historical theories could be reconfigured in accordance with the critical language to which we are accustomed. On the other hand, it is equally tempting to simply use the Shanghai film theory as a tool to improve Bazin. What I want to do here is to take up a methodology proposed by Thomas Elsaesser: seeing each historical attempt to propose a theory of cinema ontology as the symptom of a crisis—be that cinematic, sociopolitical or philosophical. In so doing, I can map that crisis onto our current crisis of thinking cinematographic reality in relation to the digital image. What I suggest here—as Elsaesser did—is not that the digital image has actively transformed the ontology of the moving image, but that it inspires us to think “retrospectively” and “retroactively” that the way we used to define cinema was in itself limited by certain historical imaginations. Perhaps more importantly, by acknowledging that it is possible to doubt the line of film theoretical thinking that led towards the intellectual environment that nurtures Bazin’s film thinking—i.e. French phenomenology and the photogénie movement—and to locate the blind spot that both schools of ontology share, a new comparative space may emerge that can offer us further potential to rethink what cinema can be, that is, the cinema that “has not yet been invented.”6 In the intervention that follows, I argue that the very term “approaching reality” can offer us an insight into this gap between cinema spectators’ affective states and the image-consciousness they apprehend. It also reveals the historical limitations in our understanding of time beyond those terms as distance and boundary, beginning and end, progression and regression—temporal potentialities that are currently opened up by the digital image.

KW - China

KW - Film Theory

M3 - Article

SN - 1938-1700

VL - 7

SP - N/A

JO - World Picture Journal

JF - World Picture Journal

IS - N/A

M1 - N/A

ER -