Fiery Cinema

Weihong Bao is assistant professor of film and media and Chinese studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

"An admirably ambitious account that combines a painstakingly researched history of Chinese cinema with a compendium of concepts drawn from media studies and affect studies as well as cinema studies."-Rey Chow, author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture"Fiery Cinema is the most audacious book I’ve read in a while. Bao combines theories of experience with huge amounts of rigorous and original archival research to reverse the retreat from the social usually associated with affect theory. This is both a ground-breaking new history of Republican era Chinese cinema culture and a new benchmark for film and media studies in general."-Chris Berry, King’s College London"This significant interdisciplinary book breaks new ground in recontextualizing Chinese cinema through its mediation with competing artistic media, technological forms, psychosomatic practices, and historical discourses. In a refreshing look at theories of affect and intermediality, Fiery Cinema offers a rigorous examination of such cultural productions as martial arts film, left-wing drama and cinema, print publications, and wartime propaganda and convincingly establishes cinema as a powerful affective medium of visuality, performativity, aestheticization, and communication in the history of Chinese modernity."-Yingjin Zhang, University of California, San Diego"A deeply ambitious, richly detailed book,  Fiery Cinema. . . is a landmark study for understanding Chinese cinema. . . Essential."-CHOICE"Fiery Cinema demands multiple encounters and readings, and its insights will reverberate in the field of Chinese film and media studies for years to come."-Modern Chinese Literature and Culture"Bao’s thinking is characterized by a peripatetic vitality that ceaselessly draws surprising and persuasive connections between seemingly unlikely but always conceptually illuminating terms and contexts."-452°F"Fiery Cinema is a diligently researched and persuasively argued monograph that fundamentally changes the paradigm of the studies of Chinese cinema and media. . . undoubtedly one of the most important books published on Chinese cinema and media in recent years."-China Quarterly"Fiery Cinema is undoubtedly a groundbreaking work in Chinese cinema and media studies in recent years. With extremely rich archival materials and compelling arguments driven by self-conscious theoretical explorations, the book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Chinese cinema, film and media theory, and political theory in general."-Frontiers of Literary Studies in China"Weihong Bao’s Fiery Cinema stands as an impressive study that is destined to become required reading for scholars working in the fields of film and media studies and modern Chinese cultural studies. In a sea of formulaic academic monographs this is one of those rare books that changes the formula and breaks the mold."-Pacific Affairs"Weihong Bao’s Fiery Cinema offers an account of the cinema as a medium of energy and action, incendiary light and political protest"-Critical Inquiry"This book makes an important contribution not only to the history of early Chinese cinema, but also to our appreciation of the role of cinema in defining modernity."-China Review International

• ContentsIntroductionPart I. Resonance1. Fiery Action: Toward an Aesthetics of New Heroism2. A Culture of Resonance: Hypnotism, Wireless Cinema, and the Invention of Intermedial SpectatorshipPart II. Transparency3. Dances of Fire: Mediating Affective Immediacy4. Transparent Shanghai: Cinema, Architecture, and a Left-Wing Culture of GlassPart III. Agitation5. “A Vibrating Art in the Air”: The Infinite Cinema and the Media Ensemble of Propaganda6. Baptism by Fire: Atmospheric War, Agitation, and a Tale of Three CitiesAcknowledgmentsNotesFilmographyIndex