Speaker: Victor Fan, Reader in Film and Media Philosophy, Department of Film Studies, King’s College London
Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Lam Nin-tung’s (林年同) ‘The Spatializing Consciousness of Chinese Cinema’ [中國電影的空間意識, 1983] has long been considered an article on the aesthetics specific to Chinese cinema. Published before the emergence of film philosophy as a field of study, Lam’s ambitious and truly original proposal to rethink the cinematographic image as a spatializing consciousness has been grossly overlooked by his peers. For Lam, even though the cinema is technologically and ideologically configured according to the European theory of perspective, Chinese filmmakers have long experimented with spatializing the relationship between the spectator’s body and the image, via the technē of camera perception, by layering views of reality onto a two-dimensional frame. In so doing, Lam sees the cinematographic image-consciousness as a process of jing-you (鏡游 or mirroring-journeying), one that challenges the anthropocentric understanding of cinematographic perception. His film philosophy, Fan argues, addresses the shortcomings of the binary notion of subject-object divide and deconstructs the relation between film semiotics and aesthetics.
Lam’s contribution to film philosophy does not stop at proposing a groundbreaking understanding of the cinematographic image as consciousness before and separately from European film phenomenology and Deleuze’s two cinema books. He also decolonizes film studies by building an episteme that puts into consideration Chinese film history, aesthetic debates, as well as Daoist and Buddhist philosophies. This talk is developed out of a collaborative project between Fan and Liu Siqi to translate Lam’s magnum opus into the English language. Through a line-by-line scrutiny of his writing, key concepts, as well as the archival and scholarly references he uses, they unearth and reconstruct Lam’s highly systematic method. In this talk, Fan discusses not only Lam’s philosophy itself but also the process of translation as epistemic reconstruction.
Victor Fan is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy at the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London and a film festival consultant. Fan graduated with a Ph.D. from Yale University and an MFA at School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His articles have also been published in peer-review journals including World Picture Journal, Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, Film History: An International Journal, and many other edited volumes. His film The Well was an official selection of the São Paolo International Film Festival; it was also screened at the Anthology Film Archives, the Japan Society and the George Eastman House.
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