“Transparent Shanghai”: Cityscape, Vertical Montage, and a Left-wing Culture of Glass - Presentation by Weihong Bao September 23, 2010

This talk considers the dynamic interaction between Chinese architectural discourses and cinematic reflections in the mid 1930s
evolving around a “culture of glass,” closely affiliated with international modernist architecture and a commodity culture of display. Weihong Bao will pursue how architectural and cinematic discourses, produced in their particular semi-colonial settings, competed with each other with claims of transparency to transform perception, dwelling, and sociality. Her particular interest lies in how Chinese left-wing filmmakers, upon the advent of sound cinema, sought for a “vertical montage” of sound and image to rival the radicality of modernist glass culture while appealing to the local mass audience, hence searching for a third space between the global hegemony of Hollywood and Soviet cinema.

Weihong Bao, assistant professor of Chinese film and media culture at Columbia University, received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2006). Trained in both film studies and East Asian literature and culture, she focuses on early Chinese cinema, with broad interests in Chinese cinema, drama, and visual culture from late Qing to the contemporary period as well as international silent cinema, film theory, and film history. Her book manuscript examines the historical operation of aesthetic affect and intermediality from late 19th century to the mid 1940s in Chinese film and media culture. Her research and teaching interests center on film and intermedial aesthetics, spectatorship and the history of perception, visual and acoustic modernity, and genre connections across modern Chinese literature, drama, and cinema. Her recent publications include "In Search of a Cinematic Esperanto: exhibiting Wartime Chongqing Cinema in Global Context,” "Biomechanics of Love: Reinventing the Avant-Garde in Tsai Ming-liang's Wayward 'Pornographic Musical,'" "From Pearl White to White Rose Woo, Tracing the Vernacular Body of Nüxia in Chinese Silent Cinema, 1927-1931," and "A Panoramic Worldview: Probing the Visuality of Dianshizhai huabao."

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscalf10.php