A Culture of Resonance: Intermedial Spectatorship and the Forgotten Futures of Chinese Cinema

UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies sponsors a talk featuring speaker Weihong Bao and panelist Cindy Menghsin Horng about Chinese cinema of the late 1920s.

In 1920s China, just as the institution of cinema was solidifying, the boundary of cinema was by no means hard-edged. This presentation looks at Chinese cinema in the late 1920s, when circulated news of invented new media and popular scientific imaginations of the diverse future of cinema incited a new conception of film-audience relationship, namely, a spectatorial mode of resonance (gongming). This resonance was predicated on a spectator as a medium of sympathetic vibration and on the possibilities of televisuality, where hypnotism and distant communication technologies intersect. This notion of spectatorship was also enmeshed in a broader culture of resonance, where psychology, physiology, and vitalist philosophy cross fertilize each other as competing technologies of perception. By investigating the historical formation of an intermedial spectatorship, this inquiry exercises a radical de-centering of cinema as a singular, fixed medium. Bringing the forgotten futures of cinema in view, they challenge the teleology of Chinese film history.