The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema by Tang, Pao-chen;

Short description:

This book explores the animist imagination in contemporary East Asian cinema, where natural elements like winds, trains, balloons, and snowflakes become living entities that co-exist with humans.

More

Long description:

Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. Pao-chen Tang theorizes and analyzes this animist imagination—a new mode of filmmaking that delves into both the definition of the cinematic medium and how to live with the nonhuman. Moving images are animate beings and the animism of cinema further compels an eye-opening vision to examine East Asian history and ecological anxieties of our times. The shamanic protagonists of the animist imagination transform the worldly and medial figurations onscreen into thought experiments on human-nonhuman relationality, modelling for the viewers anti-anthropocentric forms of existence and action. The book distills this form of agency through a systematic analysis of narrative structures, stylistic devices, and cultural implications in a stunning demonstration of a world viewed and enacted otherwise.

The life of all things is intertwined with the life of cinema in The Animist Imagination—even as it is overcast by ecological decline. Tang's exhilarating exploration of a seminal cluster of East-Asian films reveals the cinema's power to aesthetically mediate but also, more immediately, to imagine, to resurrect, to intimately share and relate human and non-human worlds. But while exploring the limits of the human, Tang's approach is unapologetically humanist, insisting on the social sphere and on the political stakes of the films as, themselves, archives of our connectedness with the world, portals to shared experience, challenges to modernity's disenchantments. Geo-historically specific and theoretically ambitious, the book advances through nuanced close analyses of exemplary films, reflecting on the potentialities of the medium and the longer history of moving images, while firmly grounded in our present condition.,— Noa Steimatsky, author of Italian Locations and The Face on Film, Balancing close analysis and theoretical insights, Tang (like a critical Wukong) reveals cinema's enduring capacity to define—and destabilize—what it means to be human. While the book's broader orientation is ecocritical, its methodology unfolds through an absorbing, imaginative dialogue with carefully selected films, proposing fiercely original ways of seeing classic works anew., —Shiao-Ying Shen, Associate Professor, National Taiwan University

Through detailed readings of several East Asian films featuring in-depth analysis through elegant prose, the book makes an admirable contribution to the study of contemporary transnational cinema while also lending itself to ecocritical studies. The ideas are highly polished and the writing and documentation flawless. —Jason McGrath, Professor, University of Minnesota

More

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements, Introduction: Cinematic Animism and Its Shamans, Chapter One: The Child and the Balloon, Chapter Two: The Child and the Train, Chapter Three: Spectrum Animality, Chapter Four: In the Snow, Chapter Five: A Tale of the Evil Wind, Coda, Bibliography, List of Illustrations, Index.

More