In Cinema Approaching Reality, Victor Fan brings together, for the first time, Chinese and Euro-American film theories and theorists to engage in critical debates about film in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1920s through 1940s. His point of departure is a term popularly employed by Chinese film critics during this period, bizhen, often translated as “lifelike” but best understood as “approaching reality.” What these Chinese theorists mean, in Fan’s reading, is that the cinematographic image is not a form of total reality, but it can allow spectators to apprehend an effect as though they had been there at the time when an event actually happened. Fan suggests that the phrase “approaching reality” can help to renegotiate an aporia (blind spot) that influential French film critic André Bazin wrestled with: the cinematographic image is a trace of reality, yet reality is absent in the cinematographic image, and the cinema makes present this absence as it reactivates the passage of time. Fan enriches Bazinian cinematic ontology with discussions on cinematic reality in Republican China and colonial Hong Kong, putting Western theorists—from Bazin and Kracauer to Baudrillard, Agamben, and Deleuze—into dialogue with their Chinese counterparts. The result is an eye-opening exploration of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew, especially in the photographic materiality following its digital turn.

Reality has become an increasingly prominent topic in contemporary philosophy. The book’s contributors are responding to the challenge to use the philosophically underexplored potential of film to disclose what the editors propose to call “the real of reality.”

Over the last few decades, film has increasingly become an issue of philosophical reflection from an ontological and epistemological perspective, and the claim doing philosophy through film has raised extensive discussion about its meaning. The mechanical reproduction of reality is one of the most prominent philosophical questions raised by the emergence of film at the end of the nineteenth century, inquiring into the ontological nature of both reality and film. Yet the nature of this audio-photographic and moving reproduction of reality constitutes an ontological puzzle, which has widely been disregarded as a main line of enquiry with direct consequences for philosophy. Regarding this background, this volume brings together the best papers from the Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film: Thinking Reality and Time through Film, held in 2014. What they all have in common is the discussion of new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. Whether by philosophizing through concrete examples of films or whether looking at films ontological reliance on time and image, or its intra-active entanglement with reality or truth, this book explores grasp films nature philosophically, and provides new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker, as well as for the freshman fascinated by film for philosophical reasons.

In formulating a notion of filmic reality, The Reality of Film offers a novel way of understanding our relationship to cinema. It argues that cinema need not be understood in terms of its capacities to refer to, reproduce or represent reality, but should be understood in terms of the kinds of realities it has the ability to create. The Reality of Film investigates filmic reality by way of six key film theorists: André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. In doing so, it provides comprehensive introductions to each of these thinkers, while also debunking many myths and misconceptions about them. Along the way, a notion of filmic reality is formed that radically reconfigures our understanding of cinema. This book is essential reading for film scholars, students and philosophers of film, while it will also appeal to graduate students and specialists in other fields.

Within the last two decades “intermediality” has emerged as one of the most challenging concepts in media theory with no shortage of various taxonomies and definitions. What prompted the writing of the essays gathered in this volume, however, was not a desire for more classifications applied to the world of moving pictures, but a strong urge to investigate what the “inter-” implied by the idea of “intermediality” stands for, and what it actually entails in the cinema. The book offers in each of the individual chapters a cross-section view of specific instances in which cinema seems to consciously position itself “in-between” media and arts, employing techniques that tap into the multimedial complexity of cinema, and bring into play the tensions generated by media differences. The introductory theoretical writings deal with the historiography of approaching intermedial phenomena in cinema presenting at the same time some of the possible “gateways” that can open up the cinematic image towards the perceptual frames of other media and arts. The book also contains essays that examine more closely specific paradigms in the poetics of cinematic intermediality, like the allure of painting in Hitchcock’s films, the exquisite ways of framing and un-framing haptical imagery in Antonioni’s works, the narrative allegories of media differences, the word and image plays and ekphrastic techniques in Jean-Luc Godard’s “total” cinema, the flâneuristic intermedial gallery of moving images created by José Luis Guerín, or the types of intermedial metalepses in Agnès Varda’s “cinécriture.” From a theoretical vantage point these essays break with the tradition of thinking of intermediality in analogy with intertextuality and attempt a phenomenological (re)definition of intermedial relations. Moreover, some of the analyses target films that expose the coexistence of the hypermediated experience of intermediality and the illusion of reality, connecting the questions of intermediality both to the indexical nature of cinematic representation and to the specific ideological and cultural context of the films, thus offering insights into a few questions regarding the “politics” of intermediality as well.

Introduction -- Resonance. Fiery action: toward an aesthetics of new heroism -- A culture of resonance: hypnotism, wireless cinema, and the invention of intermedial spectatorship -- Transparency. Dances of fire: mediating affective immediacy -- Transparent Shanghai: cinema, architecture, and a left-wing culture of glass -- Agitation. "A vibrating art in the air": the infinite cinema and the media ensemble of propaganda -- Baptism by fire: atmospheric war, agitation, and a tale of three cities.

In their study of religion and film, religious film analysts have tended to privilege religion. Uniquely, this study treats the two disciplines as genuine equals, by regarding both liturgy and film as representational media. Steve Nolan argues that, in each case, subjects identify with a represented ‘other' which joins them into a narrative where they become participants in an ideological ‘reality'. Finding many current approaches to religious film analysis lacking, Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion explores the film theory other writers ignore, particularly that mix of psychoanalysis, Marxism and semiotics - often termed Screen theory - that attempts to understand how cinematic representation shapes spectator identity. Using translations and commentary on Lacan not originally available to Screen theorists, Nolan returns to Lacan's contribution to psychoanalytic film theory and offers a sustained application to religious practice, examining several ‘priest films' and real-life case study to expose the way liturgical representation shapes religious identity. Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion proposes an interpretive strategy by which religious film analysts can develop the kind of analysis that engages with and critiques both cultural and religious practice.

"Cinema and Sensation: " "French Film and the Art of Transgression" looks at a much-debated phenomenon in contemporary cinema: the reemergence of filmmaking practices (and, by extension, of theoretical approaches) that give precedence to cinema as the medium of the senses.France offers an intriguing case in point here. A specific sense of momentum comes from the release, in close succession, of a series of films that exemplify a characteristic awareness of cinema s sensory impact and transgressive nature: "Adieu"; "A ma soeur"; "Baise-moi"; "Beau Travail"; "La Blessure"; "La Captive"; "Dans ma peau"; "Demonlover"; "L Humanite"; "Flandres"; "L Intrus"; "Les Invisibles"; "Lady Chatterley"; "Lecons de tenebres"; "Romance"; "Sombre"; "Tiresia"; "Trouble Every Day"; "Twentynine Palms"; "Vendredi soir"; "La Vie nouvelle"; "Wild Side"; and "Zidane, un portrait du XXIeme siecle." These films, among others, typify a willingness to explore cinema s unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually.Martine Beugnet focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream cinema. Her book draws on the writings of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Bataille, among others, but first and foremost, she develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques, and motifs that allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. In turn, she demonstrates how the films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching today s most burning sociocultural debatesfrom the growing supremacy of technology, to globalization, exile, and exclusion."

A director reveals the original inspirations for his films, their history, his methods of work, and the problems of visual creativity

Examining how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with this perturbation between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book traces how Hong Kong's extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. 'Extraterritoriality' scrutinises creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries - especially those by marginalised artists - actively rewriting and reconfiguring how Hong Kong cinema and media are to be defined and located.