Haiping Yan: Intermedial Moments: An Embodied Turn in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

This essay aims to foster thinking about the increasingly prevalent but highly fluid notion of the intermedial, a term that may be more productively approached with and/or "defined" by its various occurrences in historically specific scenes and scenarios across the fields of contemporary arts.  By working through a constellation of Chinese films produced in the first decade of the 21st century, specifically, this essay offers a further argument on how a distinct aesthetic transpires therein, intimating what may be called an “embodied” intermedial turn in contemporary Chinese cinema, which brings into a cognitive focus a humanly inhabited gesture evocative of a deeply differential country and its cultural re-production in intricate mutations. Without caving into but, rather, remaining at odds with the logic of global capital and its 'liquidating' motions of spectacle industry (Benjamin, 1972:221-222), this essay argues, these works refunction the cinematic by engaging the conditions and mediations of live-world intermedially, turning themselves into embodied innovations in the transformation of the aesthetic and the historical, at another conjuncture for a modernizing China and, perhaps, of modern times in general.

Formerly Professor of UCLA in Theatre, Film and Television and Cornell University in Theatre/Performance Studies and Asian Studies Haiping Yan is presently University Professor of Cross-cultural Studies and the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Media and Society at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University.