Cinema at the table, cinema as roundtable

Abstract

Despite its great physical or symbolic weight in the studies of architecture and design, the table, especially the roundtable in cinema—and its place in the history and historiographies of moving images—remains overlooked and undertheorized. This essay aims to provide an overview of why the notion of the roundtable is integral to our examination of global Chinese cinephilia throughout the special issue. To that end, the essay suggests the need to understand the table on and offscreen before we historicize the roundtable within the cinemascape. The relationship between cinema and the table as a spatial metaphor, a mode of framing, and as infrastructure is highlighted. Particularly important is how the roundtable stands out as a critical lens through which we create space for further historiographic thinking about cinema. In the essay, Roundtable Cinephilia is a working concept to acknowledge a variety of flexible cinephilic encounters across time, space, and scale, as well as across print, audiovisual, electronic, and digital platforms; it should also point to the possibility of reorientation through border-crossing experiences and encounters. In short, the essay recognizes the roundtable as a global intermedial genre, an analytical category particularly exemplified within and across the Chinese and Sinophone cinephile communities. Rather than how people gather or how they are seated around the roundtable, the most pressing question addressed in the essay, then, is whether we can have a roundtable, or common ground, not just around which to sit together, but also from where to stand up, leave, and reorient ourselves. Drawing on the special issue, we hope in this way to have taken steps toward enacting, more than just proposing, what cinema as roundtables can do.

Keywords:

• Table
• publicness
• community
• roundtable cinephilia
• collective production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 As introduced in O-Cinephiles Assembly’s roundtable, Filmaholic published a series of roundtable discussions including “Sometimes Cinema is a form of Violence of Opinions” and “Serialized Cinema through Streaming Services.” Both are roundtable discussions on Netflix Films. https://filmaholic.tw/films/5e833660fd89780001b92083/(accessed on May 15, 2020). As for the film critics’ roundtable discussion organized by and published in Funscreen, as mentioned in this quote, see Ju Mao, Pony Ma, Cari, and Sang Ni (2020).

2 For example, Jack Tang, one member of the O-Cinephiles Assembly, and Pony Ma, a participant in the Funscreen roundtable in Taiwan, are two film critics who have quite actively participated in the roundtables organized by Deep Focus.

3 This also echoes D. W. Griffith’s words in an interview near the end of his life: “What the modern movie lacks is beauty—the beauty of moving wind in the trees.” See Slide (2012, 217).

4 Bao Weihong offers an inspiring close reading of the table scene in her book. See Bao (2015, 448).

5 In this case, filmmaking is mainly a matter of choosing one strategy over another when it comes to staging the dinner table. Yasujirō Ozu, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and other eminent directors have developed a wide variety of solutions. See Bordwell (2005, 1–7).

6 Scholars have noted the metaphorical desk in media history and in a group of recent films categorized as “desktop films”: Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended (2014), Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake (2014), Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching (2018), and so forth. These films incorporate the computer desktop environment as part of the film narrative by combining screen recordings and other sources, including original or found footage, with PC-delivered data. See De Rosa and Strauven (2020, 231–62).

7 The notion of the round table was first introduced in Roman de Brut. The round table stands not only for the physical object at which the knights and Arthur himself sat but also for the code to which the Arthurian knights committed themselves and the general symbolic order of knighthood. One of the very few surviving examples of a large round table dating from the fifteenth century is at Winchester Castle in Hampshire, UK. For more details about the round table as a symbol rooted in the legend of King Arthur and his knights, see Martin Biddle, Sally Badham, et al. (2000).

8 For a historical record of the Algonquin Round Table, see Fitzpatrick and Benchley (2009).

9 The practice called line rehearsal indicates that only the dialogue or lines are read, which may be done with the actors seated around a table.

10 The project is curated and hosted by the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Centre (CCCB). Filmmakers who participated in the collaborative work include José Luis Guerin (Barcelona), Jonas Mekas (New York), Isaki Lacuesta (Girona), Naomi Kawase (Nara), Albert Serra (Banyoles), Lisandro Alonso (Buenos Aires), Víctor Erice (Biscay), Abbas Kiarostami (Teheran), Jaime Rosales (Barcelona), Wang Bing (Shaanxi), Fernando Eimbcke (Mexico City), and So Yong Kim (Busan/New York).

11 For an important reference specifically about twelve Asian film manifestos hailing from a range of contexts and eras, and the archival records of the gatherings and meetings through which the manifestos were produced, see Darcy Paquet ed. (2019). NANG is a ten-issue magazine dedicated to cinema in Asia.

12 The declaration was translated by Shelly Kraicer. For an account of this roundtable symposium and the creation of this manifesto as the incomplete script in a smoke-filled side room, see Kraicer (2011).

13 The massive 1963 civil rights gathering has often been synonymous with Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

14 Screenings of The March and The Hollywood Roundtable went hand in hand in September of 1963. According to a memo from a USIA station in Hong Kong, the films were shown as a pair on a local TV show to over 120,000 people, with a favorable reaction from viewers. In addition, they were shown in schools and at the USIA auditorium. For more details about the latter film in the National Archives at College Park—Motion Pictures (RDSM), see Green (2012).

15 For more well-documented details about the roundtable event, see Graham (2015, 131–48).

16 For a detailed study of WeChat as infrastructure and operating mobile system in China, which I’ve benefitted from, see Plantin and Seta, (2019, 257–73).

17 See the official website of the Austin Film Festival

https://austinfilmfestival.com/festival-and-conference-aff/conference/faq-roundtables/.

Many more film festivals organize live roundtables as a way of creating interactive space for cinephiles, filmmakers, and other film professionals. Virtual roundtables have been especially popular and pervasive during the pandemic.

18 Deep Focus’s different theme-oriented or project-based groups refer to those groups that respectively focus on ratings of theatrical cinema, translation projects, collecting thematic materials, film festival studies, group-based film festival journalism, and so on.

19 Hongbao is usually associated with Chinese New Year when red envelopes are filled with money and given as gifts. Red envelope criticism here thus refers to the phenomenon of film critics or journalists accepting money from film production companies or distribution agents in China in exchange for positive reviews.

20 For examples of the Hollywood Roundtables, see Dahkil et al. (2012).

21 David Cronenberg, especially, shows a reflective view of the graphic violence and sexual content that permeates his own early films. For more detailed highlights, see Anonymous (2013).

22 The quote is from the host Clive Barker. The TV documentary is accessible on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TosdCShzD4g&t=148s.

23 The selected transcript of the discussion was published in one of the most well-known film magazines in socialist China. See Chen (1958, 32).

24 For example, film collectives and cinephile communities such as Cinema Action as a collective for film production, mobile cinema, distribution and a film workshop; the Berwick Street Film Collective; the London Women’s Film Group, and so on. For a well-documented record of these communal gatherings and the networked dimensions of film experiences, see Bauer and Kidner (2013). For an archival record of the case of the Film 101 Work Studio in China, see Xu (2016).

25 One such example is the monthly roundtable discussions initiated by Metropolitan Motion Picture Club in New York. See Moore and Amateur Cinema League (ACL) (1935, 250). The New York-based Amateur Cinema League was founded in 1926. For more discussions around the rich historical context of the ACL and amateur film clubs in general, see Kattelle (2003, 238–51); Tepperman (2014).

26 For discussions about cinephilia in the digital age, see McWhirter (2016). For such experimental roundtables, see Dienstfrey et al. (2018). More recently, such discussions have centered on “cinephilia in quarantine” and stay-at-home cinephiles’ experiences during the pandemic. See Connell (2020). For an example of digital cinephilia, also a virtual cinephilic discussion, see Kasman, Sallitt, and Phelps (2021).

27 Examples of such roundtables in the field of film studies include: Rentschler et al. (2014, 20–28; Berry et al, (2016, 67–86); Crowdus et al. (2017, 10–16); Andrew (2014, 5–26); Metz et al. (2018, 145–160).

28 Sun’s review was originally published elsewhere. See Sun Shaoyi (2001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Belinda Qian He

Belinda Qian He recently received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (CMS) at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is teaching in the Department of Film and Media Studies, University of Oklahoma and worked as a CCS postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley (2020–21). Her research engages the history of East Asian and transnational screen media, with a focus on image circulation of and as violence over space, through time, and across scale. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Grey Room, The Child in World Cinema, Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, among others. Her in-progress book project that lies at the intersection of film & media studies, art history, and legal humanities, has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Asia Art Archive & the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Library of Congress, etc.