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The oft-undiscernible boundary between imaging and imagining is especially apparent in our cinematic experience. In Buddhist philosophy, imaging and imagining are neither the same nor different, neither not the same nor not different. In this article, I argue that imaging in Buddhism refers not only to the formational process of an image (external form) out there, but also the external form's interdependent relationship with the internal forms (sensory organs). Likewise, imagining refers not only to the formational process of an image in here, but also to how these imaginations constitute the body's relationship with the larger milieu out there. In the second half of this article, I analyse how the interdependent relationship between imaging and imagining is configured textually and in the overall cinematic experience in Bi Gan's Diqiu zuihou de yewan/ Long Day's Journey into Night (2018).

This chapter is about the critical debate on what it meant by Hong Kong cinema after the 1967 Riots, and the historical context––both in the film industry and in politics––that shaped the contour and topos of this debate. In this discourse, the question ‘What is Hong Kong cinema?’ was never raised or addressed directly. Very often, it was asked under the disguise of finding out what Chinese cinema was. Film critics between 1966 and 1978 worked through this problem by understanding how Hong Kong left-wing Cantonese filmmakers in the 1950s grappled with this question, and the anxieties such question had generated, both narratively and stylistically. Through their retrospective investigation, these critics retroactively theorised how Hong Kong cinema gradually individuated itself from Chinese cinema out of its long history of being politically ostracised, linguistically marginalised, and culturally despised by their Mainland counterparts.

The social, political and cultural complexity of post-war Hong Kong (1945–1997) produced a highly fragmented, unsystematic, and historically transient mode of critical debate on the cinema. One film scholar, however, Lam Nin-tung (林年同 Lin Niangtong, 1944–1990), tried to systematize the debate and proposed a thought-provoking idea: jing you [geng jau 鏡游] or mirroring-drifting. In this article, I argue that Lam’s theory is best understood as an attempt to re-examine the relationship between the subject and the object in cinematic perception, a project motivated by a subjectival crisis embedded within the social, cultural and political complexity of the historical period.

In the popular imagination and state-sponsored discourse, “China’s soft power” often reiterates a more-than-a-century-long narrative that China needs to “catch up” with the Euro-American “West.” It is as though taking over the United States’ leadership in branding, marketing, and exercising European humanism would be the final hurdle for China to enter modernity. My interest is not how scholars and policy makers define “soft power.” Rather, I wish to explore one of its key concepts, “humanism.” Featuring humanism as their core value with the aim of promoting China as a modern nation, contemporary Chinese blockbusters and the discourse around them consistently raise three interrelated questions: (1) What is humanism? (2) What kind of humanism can China contribute to the global community? (3) Why has Chinese cinema failed to allow a global audience to resonate with this new mode of world thinking? Nonetheless, what fascinates me is not why China fails to rebrand itself; rather, I ask how the structure of affect associated with such failure negotiates the conflicting sociopolitical values based on humanism. The film I will examine here, Zhi women zhong jiang shiqu de qingchun [So Young, Vicki Zhao or Zhao Wei, 2013], performs the indefinability, unnameability, and porousness of humanism itself.

This article rethinks where the films of Sun Yu (1900–1990) stand in a highly complex political, theoretical and industrial matrix. By combining a historical reading of the industrial conditions, and a hermeneutic reading of the theoretical discourse in the 1930s, this article argues that the ‘soft film’ is not ‘apolitical’; rather, it shares with the ‘hard film’ position a common belief that cinema is an educational tool for political ends. In this light, the article uses a close analysis of two films by Sun Yu, Tianming/Daybreak (1933) and Tiyu huanghou/Queen of Sports (1934), to demonstrate that Sun's films were intended as Nationalist propaganda. However, by focusing on perfecting the forms of these films as entertainment so knowingly, and by turning the female protagonist of each film as what Giorgio Agamben calls a homo sacer, the text becomes open to multiple and mutually conflicting readings.

For many people, the pleasure of watching a Hong Kong Cantonese film in the 1950s requires a taste for a set of stylistic traits that are distinct from classical Hollywood cinema. In this chapter, Fan argues that there is a poetics specific to the Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s. Such poetics serves to negotiate a set of conflicting sociopolitical values via a form of parapraxis (Freudian slip). With Weilou chunxiao [Ngailau ceonhiu or In the Face of Demolition, Lee Tit, 1953] as a case study, Fan proposes that the Cantonese cinema in the 1950s performs the failure of the leftwing intellectuals to perform in a colonial space where they had no active sociopolitical agency, and their collective failure to even consider returning "home" and reconstruct the "national" space. These films offer narratives in which intellectuals are reeducated and reintegrated into the masses, thus offering the spectators a "second chance" to rehearse the possibility of having a political agency to activate social change.