Sampling global roundtables and Chinese cinephilic communities in the pandemic era

Abstract

In the era of pandemic cinephilia, when social distancing, lockdown, isolation, quarantine, and online platforms have become the new normal, cinephiles’ collective longing for community, communication, connection, and contact through the love of cinema has become both dangerous and precious. Three parts constitute the introduction, which is situated in a wide, transnational and translocal context. The first part samples global roundtables that have arisen from pandemic cinephilia. The second part maps and samples global Chinese cinephilic communities—including Film 101 Workshop, Rear Window, Deep Focus, O Cinephiles, and DIRECTUBE—since the digital turn in the 1990s. The aim is to problematize the Deep Focus collective by examining its complex relationship with both capital and censorship. Now that the moment has arrived when Deep Focus is temporarily shut down and when various kinds of voices are being silenced, it is the right time for us to be vocal and multivocal by beginning with `A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia’. The third part gives a roadmap for this special issue on global Chinese cinephilia.

Keywords:

• Pandemic cinephilia
• cinephilic community
• digital turn
• collective authorship
• translocal
• border-crossing

Roundtables in the era of pandemic cinephilia, 2020–2021

When social distancing, lockdown, isolation, quarantine, and online platforms have become the new normal in the pandemic era, cinephilia—understood as a collective activity involving large screen projection, social gathering, and serendipitous encounters, what Susan Sontag describes as being ‘seated in the dark among anonymous strangers’ in her 1996 essay ‘The Decay of Cinema’—has become both dangerous and precious in our collective longing for community, communication, connection, and contact through the love of cinema (Sontag 1996). Over the past two years, in the midst of the cancellation, postponement, digitization, and hybridization of film festivals and the temporary or permanent shutdowns of movie theaters, we have witnessed the mushrooming of global cinephilic events consisting of not only increased online viewing but also a proliferation of hybrid roundtable discussions. These roundtable discussions revolve around future-oriented, pandemic-related ‘hot button’ (redian) issues, retrospective events, controversial films, and other topics which matter to the organizers of these roundtables. Thomas Elsaesser highlights ‘the element of shared experience’ in Antoine de Baecque’s definition of cinephilia: ‘a way of watching films, speaking about them and then diffusing this discourse’ (Elsaesser 2005, 28). We argue that the roundtable is a cinephilic genre par excellence. Cinephiles congregate before the big screen during film exhibitions, and convene at the roundtable, whether literally or metaphorically, to discuss films. Unlike traditional film criticism, which tends to adopt a single-authored, individual, definitive, and monologic voice, the roundtable genre is co-authored, communal, contingent, conversational, and marked by multivocality, foregrounding the reception of films as collaborative and collective—like the creation and exhibition of films.

Not confined to Chinese-language cinemas or Chinese languages as medium of communication, global Chinese cinephilia is translingual and translocal. The following is a sampling of roundtables, including two we have organized, representative of the era of pandemic cinephilia that we have observed. Organized by film festivals, film magazines, film archives, academic institutions, art cinemas, museums, and scholars across different platforms, places, languages, and time zones, these roundtables have created a constellation of collective discourse, communal culture, and cinephile solidarity.

Pandemic cinephilia has given rise to roundtables taking stock of the future of cinema based on the latest trends and pandemic-related challenges facing the film industry. The 2020 edition of the Locarno Film Festival (August 5–15, 2020), ‘For the Future of Films’, is a case in point. Locarno collaborated with trade magazine Variety to host three 50-minute virtual roundtables in the Variety Streaming Room. The first roundtable, ‘The Future of Theatrical Releases’, addresses commercial, safety, and social concerns of cinemas. Distributors and exhibitors are desperate for exciting and strong content which can bring audiences back to the theaters, but they are also dealing with limited seating capacity due to the pandemic. While cinemas largely depend on tentpole films such as Peninsula (2020), the sequel to Train to Busan (2016), Tenet (2020), and the delayed James Bond film No Time to Die (2021), Singaporean distributor Vincent Quek of Anticipate Pictures saw an opportunity for diversity brought about by the pandemic, when big players withdrew from the theaters and left room for alternative content. The other panelists also noted the positives of the pandemic, including the Support Your Local Business campaign, the Back to the Cinema campaign, and the revival of drive-in theaters. The consensus among the panelists was that the future of theatrical releases will coexist with streaming services. The third roundtable, ‘The Future of Film Festivals and Film Markets’, features film festival directors who collectively celebrate the live experience and the large screen of film festivals. Alberto Barbera, Director of Venice Film Festival, affirmed that Venice will remain a live experience in the future. Tabitha Jackson, Director of Sundance Film Festival, a festival that celebrates independent voices and filmmaking, described film festivals as ‘time-bound gatherings’, ‘modern day campfires’, and ‘sites of meaning-making’. Lili Hinstin, Artistic Director of Locarno Film Festival, emphasized the unique experience of the big screen. Sarah Schweitzman, agent at CAA Film Finance & Sales Group, raised the question of how film festivals can help restart the film industry. Tabitha Jackson’s analogy of film festivals as ‘modern day campfires’ can be applied to our concept of roundtables as a focal point for cinephilic communities.

The roundtables co-hosted by Locarno and Variety are typical examples of a cinephilic genre using a lingua franca (English) as medium of communication. Similar roundtables include ‘Shuttered Screens: Cinematheques in a Post-Covid World’, a Zoom roundtable on January 26, 2021, organized by Hong Kong’s arthouse cinema Broadway Cinematheque. Its director Clarence Tsui discussed the three shutdowns of theaters in Hong Kong in 2020 and how they tried to engage the audience with lockdown shorts featuring filmmakers talking about what films they would like to see on the big screen once the theaters reopened. Birgit Kohler, co-director of Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, pointed out that while cinema has become a dark, highly infectious space, it remains an important social space in time of crisis. Brad Deane, Director of TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto, described the transition to a digital world, where content was geoblocked for Canada. On the other hand, Paul Vickery, Head of Programming at Prince Charles Cinema in London, emphasized the collective cinema experience with the interactive sold out screenings of the cult film The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003).¹

What kind of cinephilic publics/worlds do these roundtables in English construct? How does the choice of language, platform, and speakers relate and separate cinephiles at the same time? To adapt political theorist Hannah Arendt’s table analogy, we view the roundtable as the cinephilic public realm that is ‘located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time’ (Arendt 1998, 52). We will use as examples two other future-oriented roundtables, in Cantonese and Mandarin, on Eventive and Zoom, respectively. The roundtable, ‘Envisioning a New Future for Film Viewing’, was part of M+’s (Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture) online screening program, ‘Cinema, Disrupted’, before its opening on November 12, 2021. It was conducted in Cantonese (the language of Hong Kong), moderated by M+’s Chanel Kong and Cheng Yu Shing, livestreamed on Eventive (a virtual screening platform) on March 11, 2021, and available until March 20, 2021. In the roundtable discussion, Clarence Tsui reiterated some of the points he had made in the roundtable mentioned previously, and he described the conflicting viewing experiences of audiences versus theater operators during the pandemic: A safer and more comfortable seating arrangement for audiences is not commercially sustainable for theaters. Felix Tsang, Sales & Acquisitions Manager of Golden Scene (independent distributor), shared the experience of opening a community movie theater in Kennedy Town. The opening had been delayed since 2019, and it coincided with the reopening of movie theaters in Hong Kong on February 18, 2021. Jacqueline Tong of Hong Kong Arts Centre stated her nonprofit arts institution’s support of non-mainstream independent films with the Independently Yours program and collaboration with Golden Scene. Kiki Fung, Programme Consultant for Hong Kong International Film Festival, talked about her attempt at attending a popular free screening of Japanese radical filmmaking at GOMA’s Australian Cinematheque in January 2021. David Chan, Assistant Curator at Tai Kwun and Founding Member of Phone Made Good Film (a cinephilic/filmmaking collective), invited Hong Kong female artists, such as Ho Sin-tung and Law Yuk-mui, to screen films of their choice, followed by their talks, at Tai Kwun.

In addition to the meta-roundtable featured in this special issue, we organized a Zoom roundtable, ‘Pandemic Film Culture and the Future of Cinephilia’, hosted by the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) on March 30, 2021. Unlike the M + roundtable in Cantonese, this Zoom roundtable was conducted in Mandarin to accommodate the three film festival directors from Taiwan. Clarence Tsui of Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and Thong Kay Wee of Singapore’s Asian Film Archive originally planned to present in English and partake in the discussion in Mandarin, but both ended up presenting in Mandarin like their Taiwanese co-panelists. From the start, Penny Lam of the Macau International Documentary Film Festival chose to use Mandarin instead of English. Their spontaneous decision to speak in a less familiar language shows not only their thoughtfulness but also the collective and collaborative characteristics of the roundtable genre, in which individual expression is always implicated in collective authorship, negotiation, and collaboration.

Registration and access inevitably relate and separate cinephiles at the same time. The topic and lineup of ‘Pandemic Film Culture and the Future of Cinephilia’ garnered enthusiastic interest from the film communities, including film critics, film directors, film producers, film scholars, film students, and festival curators based in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, mainland China, Japan, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US, creating a temporary global cinephile community around this roundtable. Unfortunately, the registration form required participants to identify themselves as either an HKBU student or a filmmaker. The data collection was so complicated and unnecessary that almost no outside person could register. A direct Zoom link was thus provided individually to bypass the registration restrictions. Furthermore, the Zoom platform partially excluded mainland Chinese participants. To compensate for platform inaccessibility, the roundtable was livestreamed on Facebook for non-Zoom users. The choice of language and platform included some while excluding others in this contingent cinephilic community.

Golden Horse Film Festival CEO Wen Tien-hsiang used his allotted ten minutes to present three film festivals he presides over. The 2020 Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival was canceled ‘five minutes’ before the program went to press. One major reason was the cancellation of participatory sing-along screenings and interactive screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) due to gathering restrictions. The 2020 Golden Horse Classic Film Festival showed the complete works of Federico Fellini (1920–1993) to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. The fifty-seventh Golden Horse Film Festival in November 2020 launched their first co-authored initiative (gongchuang xingdong), Take One: On the Road to Tomorrow (Qianwang mingtian de lushang), crowdsourcing to collect ‘footage from the masses’ (qunzhong sucai).² The raw footage (in the forms of a frame, a photo, a film, an illustration, and a paragraph) as a documentary of everyday life in 2020 was recreated by thirty Golden Horse winners from 2019 and used at the awards ceremony.

Wood Lin from Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) said they followed the example of Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival and postponed TIDF for one year, expecting the world to return to normal. TIDF opened on April 30, 2021 with a Hong Kong protest documentary, Inside the Red Brick Wall (2020). Lin pointed out that the ‘time difference’ between TIDF 2020 and 2021 provided TIDF with the critical distance to reflect on the timeliness of the documentaries. Unlike TIDF, the Macao International Documentary Film Festival is a small and young festival founded in 2016. Their section ‘Taste of Portuguese’ is devoted to Portuguese documentaries. The festival venue is Macau’s arthouse cinema, Cinematheque Passion.

Li Ya-mei, Director of the Taipei Film Festival, noted that Golden Harvest Awards went ahead in March 2020 while Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival was canceled in April 2020. The pandemic was raging abroad, but Taiwan was safe at that time, and the Taipei Film Festival went ahead from June 25 to July 11, 2020 as likely the world’s first physical film festival since the pandemic had begun. Li stressed that the significance of in-person film festivals lies in ‘direct and real exchange of feelings’. There is a ritualistic dimension to film festivals: dressing up, feeling nervous, appearing on stage to receive the audience’s applause.

In his presentation titled ‘Cinema Pandemia’, Clarence Tsui introduced Hong Kong Asian Film Festival (HKAFF) as an in-person film festival held in November 2020. No stranger to the roundtable genre, HKAFF organized a Hong Kong Cinema Forum featuring young directors with a live audience in 2019 and a Hong Kong Cinema Roundtable featuring young actors livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube. As the director of a film festival and an arthouse cinema, Tsui used keywords such as ‘claustrophilia’ (love of enclosure), ‘curatorship’, and ‘community’ to think through the future of cinephilia in the era of the pandemic. Singapore’s Asian Film Archive (AFA) was founded in 2005 to ‘explore Asian cinema’. Thong Kay Wee discussed how AFA tries to engage with a virtual community used to online viewing through Rewired, AFA’s online film screenings on Vimeo On Demand. During the lockdown period, April 2020, AFA started a blog, Asian Cinema Digest, and commissioned essays and video essays on Asian cinema in a series called Monographs.

As a discussant at the roundtable, Belinda Qian He raised the question of how to archive a film festival. Photos, program books, video mashups, the audience’s memories and observations, and festival reports are ways of documenting and recording film festivals. The ‘how to archive’ question is relevant not only to film festivals but also to roundtables because both are marked by a liveness irreducible to representation.

As a way of concluding this section, a distinction should be made between the roundtable experienced as a live event and the roundtable represented as a record of a live event. The roundtable as multivocal practice is a collaborative and collective shared experience, elitist (in terms of selection of panelists) yet equal (in terms of spatial arrangement), embodied and ephemeral. To capture its interpersonal exchange and transient togetherness, the roundtable is rendered into textual, photographic, and audiovisual records by the participants. The archived, documented, and represented roundtable can be read, replayed, and reconstructed retrospectively, usually by those who have not participated as panelists or audiences. Thus, the roundtable as a cinephilic genre is remediated and transmediated, bridging the experiential and temporal gap between a live and represented roundtable. The following section focuses on the mutually constitutive relationship between roundtables and cinephilic community-building by mapping and sampling Chinese cinephilic communities associated with the roundtable genre after the digital turn in the 1990s.

Mapping and sampling global Chinese cinephilic communities: Film 101 Workshop, Rear Window, Deep Focus, O Cinephiles, and DIRECTUBE

The digital turn in Chinese cinephilia has been a heterogeneous, hybrid, and interactive process occurring since the late 1990s. The Chinese cinephile communities have congregated in the physical space of exhibition venues (bars, cafés, college campuses, public libraries, and movie theaters) and the virtual space of social media platforms (BBS forums [since 1995], Douban [launched in March 2005], WeChat [launched in January 2011]), carving out a democratic discursive space of film criticism. Such cinephilic criticism has blurred the boundaries between popular and professional, collective and individual, reading and writing film criticism.

Film 101 Workshop (Dianying 101 gongzuoshi 電影101工作室), a minjian (grassroots) cinephilic community, was founded by seven young people in Shanghai on October 1, 1996. This film society started out in the form of a roundtable discussion organized around a film festival and a film magazine. After the second Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), which ran from October 28 to November 6, 1995,³ cinephile Xu Yuan, aka film critic Yaolingyao (a homophone of 101), bought the November 1995 issue of Film Stories Monthly (Dianying gushi) and wrote a letter to the editor pointing out the translation mistakes in an excerpt originally from Richard Corliss’s 1995 Time magazine article, ‘Asian Invasion: The Film World Embraces a Bonanza of New Talent from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China’ (Corliss 1995). The letter inspired the editors to look for more ‘super cinephiles’ like Xu in the February 1996 issue, calling for a face-to-face roundtable at the editorial office of Film Stories Monthly on March 23, 1996 (Xu 2016, 2–4). The discussion centered around the hot-button (redian) issue of dubbing foreign films when young audiences in China increasingly preferred the original sound of subtitled films. This roundtable was published as the first installment of a new column called ‘The Salon for Super Cinephiles’ in the May 1996 issue. To represent the roundtable on the page, the two-page column featured not only the seven participants’ takes on the dubbing issue but also their individual pictures, which provided a sense of embodied presence. The second roundtable took place at the editorial office of Film Stories Monthly in June 1996.

‘The Salon for Super Cinephiles’ developed into an internal magazine, Film 101 Office, to mark the 101st anniversary of cinema in 1996 as well as the beginning of the eponymous cinephilic community (Xu 2016, 6). The ultimate goal of this film society was to make movies. On July 26, 1998, Xu Yuan completed ‘Film Orphan Manifesto’ to express his dream of making movies without going to film school. Filmmaking is monopolized by professional film academies in China. Xu compared himself to an orphan in the kingdom of film because he did not have the opportunity to watch the films the film academy students could watch or attend the talks they could attend. He called for aspiring amateur filmmakers to join him, which resulted in three short films about thieves, which were made after the group watched Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu (1997) on videotape (Xu 2016, 173–185). ‘Film Orphan Manifesto’ pits amateur filmmaking against professional filmmaking. The former is characterized by dreams, passion, and authenticity whereas the latter has ziyuan (resources), access to otherwise unavailable classic and art films, professional techniques, and equipment.⁴ In February 1999, Film 101 Office was reorganized into Film 101 Workshop and started free public screenings of classic films sourced from various channels with post-screening discussion and distribution of booklets (Xu 2016, 209–210). In October 1999, the internal magazine was renamed Xin Yingxiang after a Taiwanese film magazine Yingxiang, aka Imagekeeper Monthly. Xin Yingxiang was sold at film critic Shu Kei’s POV Bookstore in Hong Kong (Xu 2016, 296), attesting to the translocal Chinese cinephilic connection.

By contrast, Rear Window (Houchuang kan dianying, literally ‘watching films through rear window’ in Chinese) started out in December 1998 as a Nanjing-based virtual cinephilic community, a BBS forum on the Xici Hutong (www.xici.net) online community. It was founded by civil-engineer-turned-film-critic Wei Xidi (a homophone of VCD), whose pen name reflects the materiality of cinephilia (videotapes, VCDs, and DVDs). Wei founded Rear Window because he longed for communication and exchange after watching films. For Wei, the openness of a BBS forum made possible the role switching between reader and writer (Wei 2005, 308). Before the emergence of competing platforms and technologies ‘such as portal sites, blogs, microblogs, and SNSs [social networking services]’, Rear Window had more than five thousand registered users (Zhang 2016, 35). The BBS forum can be understood as large-scale, multiple, open-ended roundtable discussions on movies. Weiyu Zhang argues that these discussions have constructed an alternative counter-discourse ‘in contrast to the state, commercial, and, surprisingly, academic discourses’ (Zhang 2016, 32). In 2013 Rearwindow Film (Houchuang fangying) was founded by Wei Xidi, Gao Da, Shui Guai, and Yang Cheng to expand the theatrical exhibition space of art films. They have promoted and screened low-budget Chinese art films at movie theaters in multiple cities beyond their Nanjing base.

Founded in Paris in March 2015, Deep Focus (Shen Jiao) is a border-crossing, cosmopolitan, transnational, young, multi-platform, and hybrid cinephile community. It embodies the flexible and vibrant film culture of global Chinese cinephilia with both online and physical presence. It publishes film criticism and information on a WeChat public account (deep_focus), Douban, and Weibo. There are around 500,000 subscribers to their WeChat public account and Douban. They have more than three million fans on Weibo. Its slogan reads: ‘We are situated around the world, watching movies with you’ (Women zai quan shijie, he ni yiqi kan dianying). Take, for instance, their metacinematic special issue Chacun son cinema (after the sixtieth Anniversary Cannes Film Festival omnibus film) on movie theaters in movies published on March 10, 2016. The cities where the contributors lived were put in parentheses to acknowledge their diverse localities.⁵ The cosmopolitan outlook of Deep Focus results from the majority of its members being liuxuesheng, or overseas Chinese students, which facilitates firsthand observations of and participation in international film festivals across the globe. Mostly born after 1990, these liuxuesheng attend film festivals and screenings and read foreign-language materials as critics, editors, and translators for Deep Focus on a voluntary basis. Mobility and proximity to European film festivals distinguish this collective of cinephile critics from the place-based Chinese domestic cinephile communities of the previous generation. The latter include not only the Shanghai-based Film 101 Workshop and the Nanjing-based Rear Window, but also the Guangzhou-based U-thèque Organization (Yuanyinghui), established in 1999 by Ou Ning and Cao Fei; the Beijing-based Touchfilm (Shijianshe), established in 2000 by Yang Zi (Yang Haijun) and Yang Chao; the Shenyang-based Free Cinema, established in 2000 by Dong Bingfeng; and the Kunming Film Study Group (Kunming dianying xuexi xiaozu), established in 2000 by He Yuan, Yi Sicheng, and Yang Kun) (Ma 2014, 237). These place-based cinephile communities often needed to rely on ziyuan of videotapes, VCDs, and DVDs, both pirated and legal, because access to film festivals and screenings was not readily available.

Deep Focus was established when a group of Chinese students studying in France attended Berlinale 2015, writing for different Chinese press outlets, such as World Screen (Huanqiu yinmu) and the Shanghai-based financial newspaper 21st Century Business Herald on a freelance basis. They banded together to watch and discuss films. At that time, print media was declining and self-published media (zimeiti) was on the rise, so five of them—Cao Liuying, Zhao Jin (aka Peter Cat), Toro Van Darko,⁶ and two other students—opened their own film review WeChat public account, built a cinephile community around it, and became the founders of Deep Focus. Their editorial choices have had an intellectual elitist bent since beginning. The influence of Cahiers du cinéma can be observed in the inaugural issue of the eponymous online publication, Deep Focus, published on their WeChat public account and Douban on March 27, 2015, featuring the editorial team’s review of Quentin Dupieux’s complex puzzle film, Réalité (Reality, 2014), and a full translation of the Cahiers interview with Dupieux. Cao Liuying, a PhD candidate in Chinese film history at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon at the time, co-founded Deep Focus and served as editor-in-chief between 2015 and 2018 (Wong 2021). Her editorial leadership distinguishes Deep Focus from other male-dominated cinephile communities. In her introduction to the inaugural issue,⁷ she acknowledges Deep Focus’s positionality as ‘cinephilic youth in France’ (zai Fa miying qingnian) and sets out to provide an alternative dimension and point of view beyond either the Chinese national cinema (guopian) or Hollywood. Deep Focus will take its readers to attend European film festivals vicariously, delve into the European film industry, and approach European film professionals, critics, and cinephiles. In her concluding sentence, Cao Liuying promises that Deep Focus will provide Chinese domestic cinephiles with the newest cinematic ziyuan of the best quality as well as a film guide with film historical and critical consciousness.

We would like to highlight two genres of cinephilic materials in the contents of Deep Focus: The first is lists of films (piandan) and the second is roundtable discussions (yuanzhuotan). Deep Focus’s theme-based lists of films are best understood as collective curatorial practice. A theme was selected and contributing writers each recommended a film that fit the theme. These lists of collective programming should be distinguished from the lists of films ‘claiming aesthetic supremacy’, which Elena Gorfinkel is against. Deep Focus’s lists of films are, to borrow Gorfingel’s words, ‘allied with collection, a desire to record, to archive, to remember, to preserve experience and the aesthetic feeling of films one might not otherwise recall’ (Gorfinkel 2019). The themes Deep Focus has curated include cinema and architecture (December 15, 2015), childhood (to celebrate International Children’s Day on June 1, 2016), divorces (September 29, 2016), human and humanity (February 8, 2017), prostitution (February 22, 2017), autumn (September 12, 2018), summer (August 18, 2019), etc. As Gorfinkel reminds us, ‘in this hyper-mediated moment, the recirculated compulsory form of the list–list as desiderata of consumption, a grocery receipt of your watching–has become an instrument of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic capture, of priapic, indulgent self-exposure’ (Gorfinkel 2019). The commercialism and cinephilic narcissism in list-making is countered by Deep Focus’s nonprofit status and collective authorship.

The roundtable is both a cinephilic genre and a collaborative, collective, and sometimes competitive form of film criticism associated with Deep Focus. As mentioned earlier, the roundtable genre is co-authored, communal, contingent, conversational, and marked by multivocality. Online roundtable discussions often center on hot-button (redian) issues and trending topics that potentially increase click-through rate and internet traffic. Each Deep Focus roundtable discussion focuses on one controversial film worth debating, with pro and con sides taken by panelists. Although Deep Focus’s online roundtable discussions preceded pandemic cinephilia, in retrospect, they envisioned the future of cinephilia with digital connectivity and democratic potentiality. The online roundtable genre has contributed to community-building and the construction of a public sphere within the limitations of pandemic isolation and political censorship.

Published on March 17, 2017, the first Deep Focus roundtable discussion, ‘Why Is Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016) Not Funny?’ was moderated by Zhao Jin (aka Peter Cat), one of Deep Focus’s editors-in-chief. In his foreword, Zhao Jin asserts that the aim of organizing a roundtable is ‘not to debate the right or wrong [of certain issues], but to widen our readers’ viewing horizons’. Since 2017, Deep Focus has organized an annual Film Criticism Competition that takes the roundtable format during the second round.⁸ In this special issue, four roundtables have been selected, translated, and archived for reasons we will come to shortly.

A key moment in the history of Deep Focus was in February 2017, less than two years after its founding, when the collective of cinephile critics received the Film Criticism Contribution Award while Dai Jinhua was given the Film Theory Contribution Award at the twenty-fifth Shanghai Film Critics Awards organized by the Shanghai Film Critics Society. The Deep Focus collective, as opposed to individual film critics, ‘has broadened the map of Chinese film criticism. They have direct contact with top-notch film professionals across the globe and demonstrate a mode of criticism with youthful sharpness and knowledge’. Also in 2017, two founders of Deep Focus, Zhao Jin and Cao Liuying, were interviewed by the Taiwan-based film magazine Film Appreciation Journal (Shitou jie and Fei Nei 2017). The same issue includes a roundtable discussion of Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016) titled ‘How Do We Debate the Formal Aesthetic of a Film?’ It features nine Taiwanese film critics, which shows the influence of Deep Focus’s roundtable discussions as a border-crossing cinephilic genre.

The cross-straits cinephilic connections do not stop here. Taiwanese film critic Alfredo Liao, who started writing his film blog Blog on Cinema (https://blog-on-cinema.blogspot.com/) in 2003, initiated the face-to-face film discussion club Duyinghui, literally Reading Films Club, in 2016. They met monthly to discuss the latest films or individual directors worth revisiting. According to Alfredo, their meetings were similar to book club meetings except that they were reading films instead of books.⁹ Afterward, Taiwanese film critic Fei Nei (Wang Chih-chin), who had participated in Deep Focus’s online roundtables, brought the concept and practice of roundtable discussions to Alfredo’s film discussion club. The roundtable discussion of Manchester by the Sea, featured in the 2017 spring and summer issue of Film Appreciation Journal that was guest-edited by Fei Nei, was the first time the audio recording of a film club meeting became available to the public in print.

Alfredo distinguishes between Deep Focus’s and Duyinghui’s roundtables, and between the roundtable discussion as a live event and as a record of a live event: Duyinghui’s roundtable chat took place ‘without the consciousness of debate and publication’. When the live chat is transcribed, the represented roundtable is full of ‘ambiguous sentences and scattered thoughts’ which need to ‘be edited, revised, and reorganized’. For Alfredo, the represented roundtable constitutes ‘editorial recreation’. The meaning of transcribing and reorganizing roundtables lies in ‘capturing some uncertain thoughts that have not yet taken shape in the exchanges between cinephiles, and various questions raised under the collision of different critical concepts of film-viewing’. In other words, roundtable discussions are concerned less with definitive conclusions than with the collaborative processes of emerging, entangled, and uncertain thoughts. A roundtable discussion of Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019) took place on October 13, 2019. Its audio recording was transcribed, edited, and published online on March 2, 2020. When the face-to-face roundtable discussion was published online, Duyinghui took the new name of O Cinephiles (O-yinghui or O影會) at the suggestion of film critic Tien Han. For Tien, O represents ‘Omni-’, or all possibilities of viewing, reading, and loving films. O also represents ‘One’, meaning the roundtable discussions are a collective work of their own. For Alfredo, O is a pictorial symbol for the roundtable.

The founding of O Cinephiles in Taiwan in the era of pandemic cinephilia exemplifies the serendipitous cinephilic encounters and journeys of the roundtable genre. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Round Table in Arthurian legend is ‘the table around which King Arthur and his knights sat, which was made circular in shape so none should have precedence’. All participants in the roundtable have equal status. Deep Focus’s roundtable discussions have been conducted in the spirit of the Arthurian Round Table, constituting a collective form of film criticism that is non-hierarchical and non-authoritative. A closer precedent in the history of cinephilia is Cahiers du cinema’s first roundtable discussion of French cinema, titled ‘Hiroshima, notre amour’ and featuring Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer in July 1959 (1985). The release of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) ‘is an event which seems important enough to warrant a new discussion’. Deep Focus adapted Cahiers’ roundtable format to the digital age. Sixty years after the French New Wave roundtable on Hiroshima, O Cinephiles organized the roundtable discussion of Joker mentioned previously. Around the same time, in November 2019, Taiwanese director Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun (Yangguang puzhao, 2019) received Best Director and Best Narrative Feature at the fifty-sixth Golden Horse Awards, which prompted Taiwanese film critic Orange Cat to organize a written roundtable discussion of the film on December 15, 2019. The discussion was published in three installments in FunScreen Weekly (Fangying zhoubao) in early 2020.¹⁰

The focus of this special issue on global Chinese cinephilia is to problematize Deep Focus. We do so by highlighting the need to examine its relationship with both capital and censorship. Like other cinephile communities, Deep Focus is interested not only in film criticism but also in film distribution and production. On December 2, 2015, Deep Focus organized a preview screening of Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues (Lubian yecan, 2015) at Filmothèque du Quartier Latin (an arthouse cinema in Paris), followed by a post-screening discussion with the director. This event was Deep Focus’s very first face-to-face activity. The co-organizers Zhao Jin, Cao Liuying, and Xu Jiahan formed a close collaboration and decided to turn Deep Focus into a company. Turning a cinephile community into a company poses the risk of commercialism. Xu Jiahan, in a conversation with us, revealed that they did so for two reasons: First, Deep Focus would be more sustainable as a company. Second, they were interested not only in creating a film review WeChat public account but also in engaging international sales and film production.¹¹

Co-founded in 2017 by Zhao Jin, Cao Liuying, and Xu Jiahan, Midnight Blur Films (Wuye Shijiao, literally ‘Out of Focus at Midnight’) is a film production company with two subsidiaries: the international sales company Parallax Films (Shihuan Wenhua) and the multi-platform media brand Deep Focus. Parallax Films has been representing Chinese arthouse titles, such as woman director Yang Mingming’s debut feature Girls Always Happy (Rou qing shi, 2018); woman director Yuan Qing’s debut feature Three Adventures of Brooke (2018), set in Malaysia; Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Ode to the Goose (2018) and Fukuoka (2019); and Kong Dashan’s debut feature Journey to the West (2021). Judging by the titles Parallax Films represents, we can see that they consistently support and promote female directors, young directors, arthouse films, and border-crossing films.

Deep Focus and Midnight Blur Films’ relationships with capital are not so much ‘the monetization of cinephilia’ that is discussed in the scholarly roundtable featured in this special issue, as cultural capital and cinematic connections accumulated through years of young, collective, and vibrant film criticism. Take, for instance, Zhu Xin’s debut feature Vanishing Days (Man you, 2018) produced by Midnight Blur Films and represented by Parallax Films. Director Zhang Lu serves as art consultant for Vanishing Days because his films are also represented by Parallax Films and he would like to help promote the film. Both Zhang Lu’s Fukuoka and Vanishing Days were screened in the Forum section of Berlinale 2019. Zhao Jin and Xu Jiahan produced Zhang Lu’s latest film Yanagawa (2021), which was shot in the eponymous Japanese town in January 2020 before the pandemic halted film production. It premiered at Jia Zhangke’s Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival as its opening film. Like Zhang Lu’s previous works, Yanagawa is a border-crossing film (Ma 2018) starring Chinese actress Ni Ni from Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War (2011), with a Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese film crew. Unlike his other works, which are mostly in Korean, Yanagawa marks Zhang Lu’s return to Chinese-language filmmaking since he directed Dooman River (2010) and relocated to Seoul to teach film in 2012 (Ma 2018, 111).

To problematize Deep Focus’s relationship with censorship, another cinephile group, DIRECTUBE (Daotong, literally ‘the filmmaker’s microphone’) should be introduced as a comparable case. Founded at the end of 2016 on a WeChat public account by Shen Hancheng, DIRECTUBE consists of the cinephile duo Shen Hancheng and Chen Xiaoran, who joined in early 2017. Unlike Deep Focus, DIRECTUBE does not publish film reviews. Instead, it focuses on publishing interviews with directors, covering film festivals and independent and arthouse films, and organizing film screenings under the name DIRECTUBE NOW (daotong xianchang). Both Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE are rich in cultural capital in the cinephile circle. However, the latter sometimes runs into trouble with censorship in the form of jubao, or being reported to law enforcement.¹²

On July 22, 2019, DIRECTUBE’s public WeChat account was blocked and permanently banned because it had been jubao. Nearly one hundred articles were deleted, and the casualties included one hundred thousand subscribers. It took them half a year to rebuild their platform and to recover their lost articles, materials, and subscribers. Most recently, despite their long-term problems with censors, some of their articles can still be situated in the context of covert cinephile activism. On August 16, 2021, they published the Chinese translation and the original English letter titled ‘To All the Film Communities in the World and Who Love Film and Cinema!’ from Sahraa Karimi, a film director and the first female president of the state-owned film company Afghan Film due to Taliban control of Afghanistan. On August 30, 2021, they covered the news of Hong Kong police and health inspectors raiding a private screening of Hong Kong director Kiwi Chow’s Beyond the Dream (2019) at an opposition district councillor’s office in Mongkok. The forty-seven attendees, including the director and the district councillor, were fined for violating gathering restrictions, which is best understood as an instance of pandemic cinephilia meeting political censorship.

As global Chinese cinephilia has become increasingly and inevitably entangled with mercantilist capital and political censorship, Deep Focus and its roundtable discussions offer a form of co-authored and collective film criticism that constructs cinephilic publics, contributes to the public sphere, and connects people in isolation. The roundtable format has become more prevalent and relevant in the new normal of pandemic cinephilia. On October 1, 2021, China’s National Day, Deep Focus published a review of The Battle of Lake Changjin (Changjin hu, 2021), a main melody Korean War film co-directed by Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark, and Dante Lam. This was not the first time Deep Focus published reviews of main melody patriotic films.¹³ However, around two hours after the negative review was published, it was deleted due to its ‘violation of related policies’. The title of the review refers to The Battle of Lake Changjin as ‘a shoddily made main melody [film]’. Nine minutes after midnight on October 2, 2021, Deep Focus’s public WeChat account was banned for fifteen days due to ‘violation of relevant rules’. At 8:00 p.m. on the same day, Deep Focus published ‘A Note Regarding the Ban on Our WeChat Public Account’ on Sina Weibo. Two hours later, Weibo banned their account, and it remained blocked for fifteen days. Deep Focus’s podcast was also removed from the Ximalaya podcasting platform before it passed censorship. Further, on October 22, WeChat blocked the public account of Zhou Xiaoxuan, a screenwriter who goes by the nickname Xianzi and whose lawsuit against well-known TV host Zhu Jun is a landmark #MeToo case in China. According to WeChat, the blockage will be effective until July 7, 2022. Most recently since December 1, Deep Focus’s WeChat public account has been banned for the second time until March 1, 2022, after their previous suspension (between October 2-15, 2021) as mentioned above. This imposed censorship is best understood in the larger context of the Cyberspace Administration of China’s latest efforts to ‘clean up’ the internet space. On December 1, Douban, a Chinese film review and community social media platform was fined 1.5 million yuan ($235,000) over its ‘unlawful’ publication and transmission of information. Now that the moment has arrived when Deep Focus is temporarily shut down and when various kinds of voices are being silenced, it is the right time for us to be vocal and multivocal by beginning with a deep focus on the tip of the iceberg. Let’s explore together, looking closely at what is behind the scenes of conventional film historiographies through the lens of Deep Focus’s role and relevance in global Chinese cinephilia.

The roadmap

Co-edited by two guest editors, Timmy Chih-Ting Chen and Belinda Q. He, the special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, ‘A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia’ partakes in ongoing scholarly trends that span the spectrum of historical and contemporary understandings of how people watch or experience films. It questions the dominant approaches to cinema spectatorship grounded on high theories (from modernist theories to psychoanalytic, cognitivist, and phenomenological theoretical approaches, as well as more recent cross-overs with neurology, philosophy, psychography, and memory studies).

The special issue sees cinephilia, much more than spectatorship, as a site of conflict and negotiation exemplified by cases in the Chinese-speaking world. It uses those cases to bring into the conversation studies of textual gaze, film reception and audience, moviegoing, fandom, and the social experience of moving images that are often separated by divergent theoretical concerns and methodological preferences. In collecting and curating a set of primary materials from what we call global Chinese cinephilic communities (such as Deep Focus), this issue shares both fresh observations about and critical reflections on cinephilia as a lively communal culture within the Chinese-speaking world.

The special issue aims to approach cinema and film experience from the perspective of ‘the roundtable’, as addressed earlier and also in its included essay ‘Cinema at the Tables, Cinema as Roundtable’, a critical concept that is itself a category of historical transformation. We seek to offer a refreshing take on the roundtable as an analytical lens or, put differently, as an object of film historiographic analysis. Specifically, the notion of the roundtable serves to stage a conversation among theoretical schools that revolves around how cinema shapes, and is appropriated by, the heterogeneous viewing communities whose members may be branded as audiences, gazers, moviegoers, masses, cinephiles, fans, cultists, receivers, consumers, users, citizens, and so on.

Five components shape the main body of this special issue. The first introductory essay, ‘Sampling Global Roundtables and Chinese Cinephilic Communities in the Pandemic Era’, opens with our observations of global roundtable discussions in pandemic cinephilia and then gives an overview of the rise of Chinese cinephile communities associated with the roundtable genre since the digital turn in the 1990s (‘Introduction’). Then, four short critical articles engage four chosen keywords that have largely emerged in global Chinese cinephilic culture (‘Critical Dictionary’). Belinda Q. He’s historical survey essay traces the notion of the roundtable in global film histories and historiographies (‘Cinema at the Table, Cinema as Roundtable’). All the essays included in the first half of the special issue are intended to guide our readers on a journey through the special issue as well as to situate global Chinese cinephilia in both the contemporary digital mediascape and a variety of historical and intellectual contexts. What follows are four pieces of sampled archival materials, the translated versions of roundtable discussions organized by the Deep Focus collective (‘Archive’). In the end, we close the special issue with a scholarly roundtable of our own, returning our critical and self-reflective gaze to the point of departure: an ongoing conversation with Chinese cinephilic communities and our positionalities through cinema (‘Reappraisal’).

We articulate the selection and categorization of materials in hopes of re-conceptualizing cinema as human encounters, as a retelling of cinema and its publics through the following questions: Who, really, is the public, the addressee, and the so-called spectator as a product of theory and discourse in these overlapping circuits of cinema, art, and the media world? What becomes of the space of cinema and its publics? How does cinema change with its changing publics? What can we learn from the multiple revisionist approaches and shifts (‘historical turn’, ‘institutional turn’, ‘material turn’, ‘infrastructural turn’, etc.) in existing scholarly concerns about the dynamics between the film text and the viewer, the shared responsibility and co-production between the maker and receiver of aesthetic meaning, the distribution of attention, and the ethics of watching in relation to the issue of citizenship?

Roundtable as method

The special issue ‘A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia’ is essentially a collaborative project mounted on various forms of collective production and co-authorship. We intended to experiment with the roundtable in a self-reflexive way. Our methodological approach to co-editing and co-producing this issue is based on a conceptual roundtable. Using the roundtable as a structuring principle, we organize each component of the special issue as one kind of roundtable. Unlike any special issue of a conventional academic journal, this issue draws on the expertise of at least forty-five individuals (of course, including two editors-in-chief and peer reviewers). Among them are two guest editors, four contributing authors (Hua Chaorong, Zoe Meng Jiang, Katherine Morrow, and Chen Jianqing), five co-translators (Xia Xiaoyu, Kelly Fan, Yvonne Lin, Ma Wentao, and Chen Jianqing, who is also one of the contributing authors), twenty participants of Deep Focus’s roundtables who gave us permission to translate their discussions, and eleven participants of the JCC roundtable we organized (in a way, it was a meta-roundtable, a scholarly roundtable reflecting on the role of the roundtable in its own right; apart from two co-editors of the special issue, participants included Ma Ran, Zoe Meng Jiang, Zhao Jin, Cao Liuying, Chen Xiaoran, Shen Hancheng, Che Lin, and Bérénice Reynaud). In what follows, we walk the JCC readers through each section of the special issue. One aspect that deserves special mention is the way we work with authors and adopt a sense of collective design and craft in our critical engagement with the theme.

The four short essays are organized by keywords that we see as four of the most widely used terms in Chinese-speaking cinephilic communities. While such terms deserve much critical attention, they are largely understudied and even almost untranslatable. We believe the four terms, lapian, pinglun, redian, and ziyuan, must be understood in their original social, cultural, and linguistic contexts, so we keep their pinyin forms. Locating and discussing the four key terms together, we worked collectively with the contributing authors in what may be seen as an unusual practical roundtable between editors and authors, and among the four authors themselves, maintaining an ongoing conversation throughout the entire planning, thinking, discussing, and writing process. We started with a Zoom chat, shared ideas via WeChat group discussions, continued communicating through email exchanges, and created a shared bibliography for each member of the ‘keywords’ group to brainstorm, compare, and examine the specific meanings of the chosen keywords. In some ways, the conventional boundary between guest editors and authors is blurred in the sense that we have supported each other and co-produced a mini dictionary of global Chinese cinephilia. Highlighting interactions and conversations held among us, we have the fortune to end up with four compelling critical essays that make valuable contributions to the study of cinema, film culture, and cinephilia that is both Chinese and global.

Critical Dictionary

Centering on the first key term, lapian, Hua Chaorong’s article ‘The Disseminated Professionalism and the Co-constituted World’ investigates a kind of scholarly or professional film analysis that has been mainly driven by and continued to cultivate a popular fascination with cinematic details, both textual and intertextual. By tracing lapian’s material origins both in film history and in the history of film studies and film education in the Chinese context, Hua uncovers how lapian as discursive practices have prepared cinephiles to be ‘not only involved in the film world but also actively (co-)constituting it’.

The second keyword is pinglun (reviews, criticisms, comments, etc.), the multiple meanings of which lead to a variety of issues and film criticism genres, including regular movie reviews, critics’ or internet users’ ratings, professional film criticisms, audiences’ comments on social media, video essays, the jury grid at film festivals, audio commentaries on the DVD, cinephilic discussions via podcast, and so forth. Zoe Meng Jiang’s essay, ‘Mass Film Criticism and Its Digital Afterlives’, focuses on the practice known as ‘mass film criticism’ (qunzhong yingping), film discussion and criticism initiated by non-professionals. Jiang examines the style and structural formation of mass film criticism (MFC) that was spontaneously led by grassroots film enthusiasts and supported by state institutions and gained momentum in the 1980s. In her discussion, Jiang notes the key role of MFC in ‘fostering knowledge and appreciation of cinema for a large population with uneven film literacy’. She also examines the digital afterlives of MFC, which have enabled a kind of sanctioned social criticism, opening some space for intense negotiations about what cinema and China should become.

While also paying critical attention to the agency of those who are more than film spectators, cinephiles, Katherine Morrow takes a case-study approach to the third keyword, redian, most directly translated as ‘hot spot’ or ‘hot button’, as in ‘hot-button issue’. When referring to a popular topic or story that spreads online, the term implies wide and fervent debates. Morrow notes that in many situations, it is a closer equivalent to the English term viral. In ‘Living in Redian (Hot Topics): Interactions of Social Media and Cinema in Glass Children (Rong Guangrong, 2019) and Better Days (Derek Tsang, 2019)’, Morrow reflects on the interplay and mutual reinforcement between cinema and social media, or rather film texts and redian as embodied in online cinephilic discussions of hot topics (such as youth suicide). Her essay suggests that redian engagement in the form of ‘newsification’ of film criticism reopens space for debate even when government intervention demands the conclusive resolution of social issues depicted in the films.

Chen Jianqing’s essay ‘Film Mining and Cinephilic Expedition and Exploitation in Twenty-First Century China’ offers an etymological account of the fourth keyword, ziyuan—literally translated to English as ‘resource’—one of the most pervasive terms within the contemporary Chinese-speaking cinephilies’ world. Chen’s recognition of ziyuan as a popular argot, the neologism replacing daoban (the Chinese equivalent of ‘piracy’) enables us to rethink Chinese cinephilic engagements, including actively searching for, making, disseminating, downloading, or streaming unauthorized films, as well as illicit sharing of imported, voluntarily subtitled, and secretly stored foreign films and videos. As Chen argues, the common use of ziyuan reconceptualizes the global internet as ‘a vast reservoir and the Internet-based media files as untapped natural resources with potential use value’. As a result, the notion of ziyuan ehabilitates Chinese cinephilia that is conventionally said to be thriving on piracy.

Archives

The materials collected in the archives section are a selection of Deep Focus’s roundtable discussions. They serve as vivid examples of how the roundtable, as we suggest throughout the special issue, has remained alive as a cinephilic genre par excellence. Among the four collectively authored roundtable discussions on display, the first case of the roundtable is concerned with a controversial Chinese main melody blockbuster: ‘Why Do People Take a Stand and Fight against Each Other for The Wolf Warrior II—The Invalid Main-Melody Film’. The other three can be considered in terms of ‘The Good, the Bad, and the On-Demand’, which engaged the dialectic between a good bad film (technically imperfect) and a bad good film (aesthetically and morally superior). ‘Twenty Two (2015): “Sentimental Fast-Moving Consumer Goods” (FMCG) of the Comfort Women?’ raises the question of whether Twenty Two is a good (technically accomplished) or bad (aesthetically and morally problematic) film. ‘How Do We Appreciate Bad Films? The Disaster Artist (2017) and Beyond’ engaged the category of ‘bad film’ (lanpian, a Chinese term referring to box-office flops and/or aesthetically bad films) in a global context. The panelists of the roundtable discussion ‘Is Loveless (2017) a ‘Film Festival Film’ on Demand?’ sharply criticized the ‘film festival film on demand’ catering to the tastes of film festivals. While we may not fully agree with all the participants’ ideas about the films, we have intentionally preserved those roundtable discussions as they were published to show the actual dynamic during the roundtable to our best ability.

A scholarly roundtable

The scholarly roundtable discussion depicted in the special issue took place between early December 2020 and January 2021. We invited scholars from a variety of backgrounds and co-founders of two remarkable cinephilic organizations/groups (Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE) in the Chinese-speaking world to share their experiences and ideas about cinema and cinephilia. We started with a virtual introduction meeting via Zoom, which initially took a roundtable form. Then, the ten participants from six different time zones continued the conversation by contributing to a Google document. The shared document afforded each participant the opportunity to partake in the discussion at their own convenience and pace, thereby enabling the roundtable to develop organically during the two-month period. The online format was thus our own timely attempt to experiment with the notion of the roundtable during the pandemic.

Overall, the roundtable organized by the Journal of Chinese Cinemas is a collaborative project in which we appreciate and aim to preserve the friction, interruption, fragmental thoughts, in-between moments, and even random diversions in our conversation and thought process. This multi-voice conversation was a live event among us and remains ongoing for everyone. The entire roundtable is divided into two parts for JCC readers. ‘Cinephilia: Positioning Ourselves through Cinema?’ is the first part, in which Timmy Chih-Ting Chen (Hong Kong Baptist University) and Belinda Q. He (University of Oklahoma) served as the co-organizers (Belinda was also the facilitator). The participants of the roundtable included scholars Ma Ran (Nagoya University, Japan), Zoe Meng Jiang (New York University), and Che Lin (Chinese University of Communication); two of the co-founders of Deep Focus, Zhao Jin and Cao Liuying; and the co-founders of DIRECTUBE, Chen Xiaoran and Shen Hancheng. In the second part, we invited our special guest Bérénice Reynaud (California Institute of the Arts) to share her experience of working as a non-Chinese and non-Chinese-speaking scholar, curator, and cinephile who has developed close connections (guanxi) with Chinese-language cinemas.

In short, the special issue invites nonlinear reading strategies that allow JCC readers to be part of a large roundtable in which they may explore different themes by moving back and forth between the categories. We think and work together in hopes of posing questions about global Chinese cinephilia and creating a shared space that does not exclude non-normative modes of being, thinking, and doing. As a great number of cinephiles within and across the Chinese-speaking world continue enacting a collective resistance to both the unequal global capitalist order and the party-state’s intervention in media industry and culture, we invite you to join our ongoing roundtable to continue various (perhaps) intertwined lines of inquiry as well as to explore how cinema connects us and what such connections enable.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timmy Chih-Ting Chen

Timmy Chih-Ting Chen is Research Assistant Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong with the dissertation ‘In the Mood for Music: Sonic Extraterritoriality and Musical Exchange in Hong Kong Cinema’ (2016). Dr. Chen has published in A Companion to Wong Kar-wai (Wiley Blackwell), the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Surveillance in Asian Cinema (Routledge), The Assassin (HKU Press), Frames Cinema Journal, and Sound Stage Screen. He is working on two research projects. The first is a GRF project titled ‘Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Inter-Asia Identities: Wartime Shanghai and Postwar Hong Kong Song-and-Dance Films, 1931–1972’. The second is a study of 1960s Hong Kong experimental cinema and street photographer Ho Fan’s cinema.

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. Before joining the Film and Media Studies faculty at the University of Oklahoma, she 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 Asia Art Archive & the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Library of Congress, etc..

Notes

1 See the roundtable on The Disaster Artist (2017) featured in this special issue.

2 The co-authored ‘footage from the masses’ can be compared to Zoe Meng Jiang’s account of Mass Film Criticism (qunzhong yingping) featured in this special issue.

3 ‘Launched in 1993 as a biennial event, SIFF went annual in 2001’ (Berry 2007).

4 See Jianqing Chen’s article on ziyuan featured in this special issue.

5 The curator of the special issue ‘Chacun son cinema’ was in Sapporo. The executive editor was in Paris. The editor was in Wuhan. The contributing writers from Lyons, Paris, Beijing, New Taipei City, Boston, and Seattle discussed their favorite movie theaters in films such as Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants (1987), Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986), Luc Moullet’s Les sieges de l’Alcazar (1989), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998), Benny Toraty’s Desperado Square (2001), Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015).

6 Film critic Toro Van Darko left Deep Focus and opened his multi-platform self-published media ‘Tuoluo dianying’ on WeChat public account, Douban, Weibo, Bilibili, Zhihu, Toutiao, and 163.com.

7 https://web.archive.org/web/20211110053747/https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/-9zo7stmT-iu5G7yiOpQKA

8 See the official description of the Deep Focus Film Criticism Competition at https://www.midnightblurfilms.com/deepfocuscriticscompetition.

9 Alfredo Liao’s quotes are from the O Cinephiles roundtable on Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), which took place on October 13, 2019, and was published on March 2, 2020; see https://vocus.cc/OCinephiles/5e5c7876fd897800015bfa65.

10 Available at http://www.funscreen.com.tw/feature.asp?FE_No=1863.

11 Xu Jiahan told us in a conversation that she was an exchange student in Paris in 2015 when she read an interview with Chu T’ien-wen about Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin (2015), published on Deep Focus’s public WeChat account on September 15, 2015. Inspired by the interview, she volunteered as a translator and met with Zhao Jin at La Cinémathèque française. Zhao Jin, Cao Liuying, and Xu Jiahan organized a preview screening of Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues (2015) and formed a close collaboration.

12 For details about DIRECTUBE’s encounters with censorship, see the scholarly roundtable with Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE featured in this special issue.

13 The translation of a roundtable discussion of Wolf Warrior II (2017) is included in this special issue.