Laborer’s Love: An Anthropotechnogenetic Mediation Between Cinematism and Animetism

1 Laborer’s Love as a Transitional Film

To understand in what sense Zhang Zhen considers Laborer’s Love as a transitional film, we should revisit the debate on the “cinema of attractions” in its historical context. Tom Gunning’s understanding of the cinema of attractions (originally, “cinema of attraction”) is based on his observation of the motion pictures made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company before the nickelodeon boom (circa 1907). For him, these films are best seen as “exhibitionist cinema” that seeks to “show something,” as opposed to creating and representing an illusion of reality. Moreover, they provide a sensual or even “psychological” impact, which Sergei Eisenstein would later call “attractions.” Gunning argues that the cinema of attractions must be understood in conjunction with the fact that these films were shown in vaudeville theaters and amusement parks among other attractions that excited the senses (Gunning 1986, 64 and 66).

Gunning and Gaudreault, as well as their followers, initially implied a historically linear teleology and a periodico-stylistic dialectics between cinema of attractions and cinema of narrative integration. Such a historical view is strongly suggested in Gunning’s work on D. W. Griffith and his contribution to the emergence of the American narrative film (Gunning 1994). Such an argument was, in the 1990s, very effective in proving that what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (1980, 1–84 and 155–240) call the “classical Hollywood system,” that is, narrative cinema made in Hollywood from 1926 to 1960, was by no means a cognitively natural style and international standard. Rather, it was a result of a historical process specific to filmmaking and spectatorship in the United States. Moreover, historically, the cinema of attractions did not disappear with the emergence of narrative integration. Rather, it was adopted by the avant-garde as early as the 1920s, reemerged as the digital image and became a new kind of attraction (Gunning 1986, 64 and 66, 2006).

However, the divide between cinema of attractions and cinema of narrative integration is questionable from both American and global perspectives. As Charles Musser points out, based on his observation of the Edison films, the urban American theater and amusement park goers lost their interest in the motion picture as an “attraction” as early as 1897. Since then, exhibitors had begun to put together film programs that would promise their viewers a combination of narrative and sensorial excitements (Musser 1990, 109–296). Even Gunning (1990, 13–14) acknowledges that the cinema of attractions and the cinema of narrative integration were neither opposite categories nor clear-cut historical delineations. In fact, Gunning’s understanding of the cinema of attractions would later be inflected by what Miriam Hansen (1999b, 59–77) calls “vernacular modernism.” For Hansen, early cinema is best understood as a popular, common, or even vulgar artistic response to modernity. As a public sphere that was open to women, the working class, and migrants, the cinema historically served as a site where dialectically contesting aesthetic, sociopolitical, cultural, and ethical values could be negotiated through sharing the image as an embodied sensorial experience (Habermas 1974, 49; Hansen 1991, 90–126). In this sense, at the core of narrative integration, there still lies the cinema of sensorial attractions that sometimes even resists narrativization.

In An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, Zhang Zhen (2005) both borrows Gunning’s conceptual framework and questions its direct applicability to semicolonial Shanghai. For Zhang, though the motion picture, known in Shanghai as the yingxi or shadowplay, was indeed advertised briefly from 1896 to 1897 as a technological spectacle. It was never received simply as a machine that generated a childlike wonder to the sensual excitements and shocks brought about by technical modernity. From her analysis of the way the shadowplay was reported and discussed in illustrated newspapers like the Tuhua ribao [Pictorial daily], the motion picture was seen as a sensorial medium that “cuts through both the nerve-pathway and the avenues traveled by the urban walker” (Zhang 2005, 15). On the one hand, the sensorial stimulations it generated served as an attraction that “exposed the ‘optical unconscious.’” On the other hand, such an attraction also served as a “collective innervation” not only via movements and excitements, but also via an opportunity for the spectators to pause, contemplate, and reenergize themselves in order to rewrite an alternative worldview in their “interaction with technology and the commodity world” (Hansen 1999a, 340; quoted in Zhang 2005, 15).

Zhang Zhen identifies the teahouse as the primary venue in which the shadowplay was exhibited in Shanghai before the 1920s, even though theaters that were dedicated to the motion picture began to emerge in the 1910s (Zhang 2005, 94–103). The teahouse is best considered as a social venue, in which friends, relatives, and business partners would gather and socialize. Staged performances would usually be offered, including singing, excerpts from popular operas or plays, and of course, the shadowplay. Early shadowplays often featured filmed excerpts from operas and the wenming xi (civilized plays). The civilized play, or sometimes being called the xinju (new theater), was popularized by a group of Chinese students in Tokyo, who established the Haruyanagisha (Chunliushe). These students included Li Shutong (1880–1942), Zeng Xiaoju (1873–1976), and Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962). Initially, their idea was to use scientific (that is, modern) technologies to stage abridged adaptations of European dramas, novels, and American popular theater pieces (Fan 2015, 154–5; Liu 2012, 20–145). These theater artists consciously combined Euro-American style of realistic stage performances and a more Chinese-operatic style of facing and addressing the audience directly from the stage. By the 1910s, sensational news items were sometimes being made into shadowplays in the form of “moral tales” (Zhang 2005, 103–8).

For Zhang Zhen, films that were made for the purpose of being watched in the teahouse did not always demand full attention from the audience. Rather, it was integrated into the spectators’ conversations. Certain audiovisual excitements might have indeed served as “attractions.” But more importantly, these shadowplays offered glimpses of lives from different classes, social circles, or even various parts of the world, which would have in turn become subjects of their discussion. As a technology, the cinema was also fully integrated in these customers’ social life, thus serving as an alternative public sphere that negotiated their relationships with technical modernity under capital colonialism. However, this teahouse style of filmmaking was increasingly criticized with the growing popularity of American and French motion pictures, as well as a call for an elevation of the cinema to an intellectual art form by writers and critics who were influenced by the New Culture Movement (circa 1915–21) (Zhang 2005, 22–30). A style of filmmaking that would offer a stronger sense of narrative integration emerged. In this light, for Zhang Zhen, Laborer’s Love represents a transition between these two modes of film style and spectatorship.

2 Media Philosophy and Media Ecology

The common underlying assumption between Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen is that the cinema is to be seen as a self-contained medium, which dialectically interacts with other socioeconomical and political discourses and nondiscursive practices. According to their line of thinking, the anthropotechnological assemblage, that is, the technological configurations (the relationalities between the actual technical components including the camera, the celluloid film, and the projector) and the human participants that contribute to the formation of the cinematic praxis, are to be understood as the substrate of the cinema. This substrate remains unchanged over time, even though the actual technical components and human bodies do change. This unchanging substrate can be regarded as cinema’s medium specificity (Denson 2020, 63–7; Hui 2016, 5–18). The form of cinematic experience, meanwhile, changes dialectically according to what Michel Foucault calls the dispositif: a network of perpetually changing sociopolitical, legal, ethical, economic, and linguistic discourses that affect how human beings are individually and collectively subjectivized (Foucault 1980, 194–6; referenced in Agamben 2009, 2).

Contemporary continental media philosophy, which takes its cues from the theory propounded by Gilbert Simondon (2012 [1958]) and Bernard Stiegler (2018 [1994, 1996, and 2001]), challenges such a common underlying assumption. Not only that the technological configurations and mode of human participation are constantly changing on their own, but they are also changing and acting on one another.^[1] In fact, anthropogenetic and technogenetic configurations are merely instantiations of a technicity, that is, a certain principle or disposition that underdetermines (as opposed to overdetermines) the configurations and mutual dependencies between technical objects, technical beings, and the overall technical environment. These mutually dependent configurations are in turn interconnected with other human and machinic assemblages (that is, the dispositif), and these configurations and relationalities are reconfigured from one split second to another, microperceptually and microtemporally, in a process of becoming that we can call our technical existence (Lamarre 2018, 10–21; Simondon 2012 [1958]).

In Cinema Illuminating Reality (2022, 173), I argue that the cinema has no medium specificity. Rather, the cinema is best understood as a perceptual-conceptual framework that generations of human beings have applied to a network of mediating processes. As Thomas Lamarre argues, technicity can be roughly understood as a substrate, but this substrate is by no means specific to the cinema. Moreover, technicity is best understood as a set of principles that both affects and is affected by the mediating processes (Lamarre 2013, 80–1). Thus, it is immanent in the processes themselves, and is by no means a substrate in the Platonic sense. Such an understanding of media ecology replaces a dialectical notion of history by an energetic one: the inter- and intra-generative processes that are based on physical, psychic, and social energies, affects, and potentialities.

Bao Weihong’s Fiery Cinema (2015) is the first studies of Chinese cinema that focuses not on its specificity, but rather on its historical transindividuations with other media and discourses in a national and even global media ecology of energetic processes. For Bao, the anthropotechnogenetic assemblage that historians would later identify as the cinema was given multiple forms as part of a need of and a fascination with the possibility of mediating, agitating, synchronizing, and negotiating affects. If so, the cinema does not have a singular ontological ground. Rather, as an assemblage of constantly changing human and technical configurations, affective and other productive energies are negotiated and transduced—together with the technical objects and beings themselves—from one metastable phase to another (Simondon 1995 [1964], 24).

Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen’s way of historicizing the cinema, and subsequently, Zhang Zhen’s, is not inherently wrong. Nonetheless, they put an emphasis on how the cinema, as a relatively self-contained and technically stable assemblage, could be read dialectically with its associated technical, sociopolitical, and economic milieu as a context. For them, as the context changed, cinema’s mode of addressing its audience (style) also transitioned from one phase to another. However, as Thomas Lamarre argues, mutually contesting anthropotechnogenetic configurations have always been layered on top of each other at any given historical moment. In The Anime Machine (2009, 12–25), he uses the animation stand—a multilayered machine where an animator would stagger one plane of image over another—as a metaphor (as I will illustrate later, he also uses it to understand two relationships between the human body and the machine). For him, any moving image instantiates a negotiation between cinematism and animetism. Animetism refers to a form of movement that is achieved by juxtaposing movements (or movement and stasis) between two or more vertically layered planes on the anime machine. Hence, what we perceive as a transition is a result of a reconfiguration in depth, that is to say, between synchronically staggered planes. Meanwhile, cinematism refers to a form of movement that is carried by a subjectivized or subjectivizing body. Such a movement is achieved on the animation stand by changing the scales and perspectives of each drawing (or configuration). Thus, what we perceive as a transition is effectively achieved by a change of perspective. In other words, the historical significance of Laborer’s Love is best evaluated not in terms of how it connects one historical phase to another, but how it instantiates an assemblage of mutually mediating configurations at the very historical moment of its production and release.

3 Ontogenetic Assemblage

What triggers Zhang Zhen’s observation, from a stylistic standpoint, is that Laborer’s Love employs a hybrid strategy of theatricality (especially associated with the civilized play) and the use of “parallel editing” or even “shots/reverse shots” that are associated with D. W. Griffith’s style of narrative integration (Zhang 2005, 105–17). Theatricality is a complex issue in Chinese film history. Early Chinese filmmakers’ unapologetic penchant to treat the motion picture as a filmed theater was never formally critiqued by Shanghai filmmakers and critics. As Bao Weihong points out, the leftwing screenwriters and directors Xia Yan and Yang Hansheng combined the motion picture, a live staged performance, and a staged protest in the early 1940s as an act of anti-Japanese political agitation (propaganda). Thus, she argues that these filmmakers regarded these intersecting assemblages (the cinema, the stage, and the street) as a network of affective media in a way similar to the concept of the “extended cinema” in the 1960s (Bao 2015, 277; Furuhata 2013). A case can be made that while the Taiwan-born and Shanghai-based screenwriter, avant-garde artist, and filmmaker Liu Na’ou (1933a, 1–2; 1933b, 1; 1933c, 1; 1933d, 2–3) called attention to film forms and aesthetics in his critical interventions, his cohort Zheng Junli (Djen Jon Lee; 1935a, 12; 1935b, 12; 1935c, 13–6), in his attempt to outline the history of Chinese cinema as an art form, preferred to consider the cinema as part of a network of performing arts (Fan 2015, 66–7, 75–7, and 89–98).

As I have pointed out in Cinema Approaching Reality, the xiju xing (theatrical nature) of Shanghai cinema before the 1930s inspired the scholars Chen Xihe and Zhong Dafeng in the 1980s to come up with what they called the yingxi theory. Based on Gu Kenfu’s (1920) article “Fakanci” [Inaugurating preface] of the Yingxi zazhi [Motion Picture Review; original English title] as well as Hou Yao’s (1926) screenwriting manual Yingxi juben zuofa [Methods of writing a shadowplay], Chen and Zhong argue that early Chinese filmmakers considered the xiju (play-drama) as the cinema’s ontological ground. For these filmmakers, mechanical reproduction merely enabled a spectacular performance to be preserved, reproduced, and replayed (Chen 2002 [1986], 2:203–14; Gu 1920, 10; Hou 1926, 13–23; Zhong 2002 [1985], 2:200; Zhong 2002 [1986], 2:224–5). However, as I argued in my book, while the cinema was seen as a new technico-technological instantiation of the theater or a new technological object that contributed to the perfection of the theatrical art form, these filmmakers and critics did have an awareness of cinema’s medium specificity. Their observation that mechanical reproduction enabled the cinematic apparatus to capture and preserve a performance (that is, a passage of time) that can be reactivated in the future resonates with André Bazin’s notion of cinema ontology (Fan 2015, 38–9). For Bazin, the cinema is to be understood as a photographic imprint of reality, which snatches a passage of time from death, preserves it, and reactualizes it as an image-consciousness: the presence of an absence (Bazin 1958 [1945], 18; Bazin 1969 [1951 and 1959], 93–6).

With the concept of “media ecology” as a new framework, my 2015 engagement with Chen and Zhong’s yingxi theory can be reconfigured. With such a framework in mind, perhaps it is less productive for us to speculate whether Chinese filmmakers and critics in the first half of the twentieth century had considered the theater as cinema’s ontological ground than to acknowledge that they saw the theater and the cinema as two intragenetically assembling anthropotechnogenetic processes. As I argue in chapter five of Cinema Approaching Reality, this is evident when the Cantonese theater artist Mak Siu-ha (1940, 1) argued in 1940 that the cinema was a zengyou (companion) of the theater. For him, the cinema had once served as a technological (or in fact, technogenetic) component of the Cantonese theater. Its emergence reconfigured the aesthetic, narratological, and stylistic traits and spectatorial expectations of the theater, thus leaving traces of the cinématique to the Cantonese stage. Moreover, the Cantonese play recorded or restaged on film had become a mode of narration specific to the modern Cantonese life. Like his contemporary Ouyang Yuqian (1954, 124–30), Mak argued that what we call the Cantonese theater was metamorphosed (or in Simondon’s terms, ontogenetically phased) from a combination of ritualistic dance and music. Therefore, he suggested that their technical commonality (or one can say, essence) is musical rhythm. In other words, the cinema and theater were intragenetically transindividuated.

To understand Laborer’s Love’s historical position, we must take into account the historical conditions of the Cantonese entertainment industry. Though the screenwriter Zheng Zhengqiu developed his career primarily in Shanghai, he grew up in a Cantonese family with strong business connections with the Canton-Hong Kong region and Southeast Asia. As Zhang Zhen (2005, 108–17) argues, the film’s protagonist (the fruit vendor, played by Zheng Gu) being a “man of science” (an educated man from the business class) who returned to China recently from Southeast Asia (implicitly, a native Cantonese) plays a significant role in its semiotic (or symbolic) negotiation.

For Zhang Zhen, as the resourceful, mathematical, and technically savvy vendor falls in love with the old doctor’s (played by Zheng Zhengqiu himself) daughter (played by Yu Ying) across the street, he is capable of designing a mechanical messaging device in order to convey fruit across the street to the young woman (and by extension, his desire). This messaging device can be considered a homemade telegraph that mediates the affects between the two lovers. Meanwhile, the doctor’s business has been implicitly affected by the community’s declining trust in herbal medicine. As a result, the vendor uses carpentry to turn the outdoor staircase of a nightclub into one that is convertible into a slide. At night, when the unknowing customers of the nightclub descend the staircase, the vendor operates a mechanism and turns it into a slide, thus making them fall. These injured customers then all go to the doctor for help, thus turning his practice into a prosperous business. Implicit in this narrative is a belief that scientific and practical knowledge (as opposed to the kind of traditional knowledge represented by herbal medicine) has enabled the vendor’s success in conquering physical distance (with the telegraph system), in negotiating desire, in business, and eventually, in marriage. It is important to note that the intertitles of the film employ phrases that are native to the Cantonese topolect, even though they are understandable by non-Cantonese readers.

Zhang Zhen’s observation that cinema culture had transitioned gradually from being an act in a variety of numbers performed in the teahouse to a narratively integrated show that demanded the spectators’ attention in a movie theatre was specific to Shanghai. As Lai Kin (2010, 172–7) points out, around the 1870s, as Canton (Guangzhou), Hong Kong, and Macau became hubs of both national and international businesses under colonialism, the Cantonese theater developed a heijyun zaidou (xiyuan zhidu or playhouse system). The Baatwo wuigwun (Bahe huiguan or Chinese Artists Association) served (and still serves today) as a guild of all theater artists. It oversaw how actors, playwrights, and other artists were being allocated not only in these cities, but also in the diasporic communities in Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. It also handled all the contract negotiations, schedules, and tours. Each playhouse (or theater) can be considered a “studio,” whose owner(s) would contract their own star actors, playwrights, and other artists for each season. Some larger theaters would also guarantee these artists the opportunity to produce phonographs, filmed excerpts of their plays, and overseas performances.

According to both Lai Kin (2010, 172–3) and Liu Ping (2012, 20–145), while the civilized play was regarded as its own art form in Shanghai, Cantonese theater artists incorporated singing into it. Thus, as the owner of Man Chee Dramatic and Benevolent Association—a New York-based Cantonese theater group established in the late nineteenth century—claimed, the Cantonese theater from the 1900s to the 1930s consisted of both civilized plays and period dramas.^[2] In fact, the concept of the Cantonese opera emerged only in the 1950s, when the playwright Tang Ti-sheng employed structural and tonal devices commonly found in Wagnerian operas (Chan 2016). These civilized plays were always performed in dedicated theaters (and sometimes in temporary theaters set up for local festivals). Meanwhile, teahouses were similar to what we now call “studio theaters.” These teahouses offered theatrical excerpts performed by understudies, as well as Cantonese music including the naamjam (southern tones) and other siukuk (popular tunes) played by (often blind) performers. In the teahouses, customers who were not interested in the performances would sit in their own chambers or far away from the stage. According to the oral accounts offered by some of these customers, since these blind performers were not able to revert the customers’ gazes, the presence of their bodies were often treated as a screen on which these customers could project their own visualizations of the narration conveyed by the lyrics (Lai 2010, 232–9). In other words, teahouse performances in the Canton-Hong Kong region often demanded attentive listening and spectatorship, as well as a strong sense of narrative integration.

Film historians have so far found little evidence that motion pictures were screened extensively in teahouses in the Canton-Hong Kong region. Rather, motion pictures were mostly shown in city halls, town halls, makeshift exhibition tents, and Cantonese theaters before 1907, and dedicated movie theaters and those Cantonese theaters that also doubled as movie theaters afterwards (Yeh 2018, 19–50). In other words, by the time the Shaw Brothers moved their Shanghai-based Unique (Tianyi) film studio from Shanghai to Hong Kong (and renamed the Southsea Studio), together with the proliferation of Cantonese sound film studios on Pak Tai Street in the 1930s, there was already a well-institutionalized entertainment industry in place (Fan 2015, 159–60). This industry acknowledged that the cinema and theater were two different anthropotechnical assemblages, though they were also treated as creatively, economically, and anthropotechnogenetically inter- and intra-dependent and layered.

Historiographically, Zhang Zhen’s presumption is that a site of performance (teahouse) provided the conditions for a specific film form. This argument is in line with, for instance, Gunning’s (1986, 64 and 66) belief that the nickelodeon provided the necessary conditions for the emergence of narrative integration. However, if we treat a place of performance as a critical point of convergence at which energetic negotiations take place, which in turn spatialize the site, each film (media object) is transindividuated out of these negotiations, of which the site itself is a part (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]; Vermeulen 2015).^[3] Such negotiations are then instantiated by what Zhang Zhen observes as the stylistic tension of the film.

4 Cinematism and Animetism

The stylistic and narrational tension in Laborer’s Love can be reconsidered as what Thomas Lamarre calls cinematism and animetism. The term “cinematism” was coined by Paul Virilio in War and Cinema (1989). It refers to a form of perception that aligns our eyes and bodies with the machine (in our case, the camera). For Lamarre, the “essence of cinematism lies in the use of mobile apparatuses of perception, which serve (1) to give the viewer a sense of standing over and above the world and thus of controlling it, and (2) to collapse the distance between viewer and target, in the manner of the ballistic logic of instant strike or instant hit” (Lamarre 2009, 5). Meanwhile, animetism, a term coined by Lamarre himself, refers to a perception in which the “eyes remain intent on looking at the effects of speed laterally, sideways or crossways, rather than racing along the trajectory of motion” (Lamarre 2009, 6).

Cinematism and animetism are not two historical phases. Rather, both modes of perception emerged out of two relationships between the human and the machine from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries: the anthropotechnogenetic perception of the human body being aligned with a moving train as though it were a bullet aiming at a target (subjectivization), and the same body looking out of the window and perceiving movement in a lateral sense (lateral relationality between the human and the machine). Both modes of perception are embedded in the cinematic assemblage and the animetic assemblage. In early American cinema, for instance, cinematism can be seen in the Biograph film Interior New York Subway [1905], a journey from Fourteenth Street to Forty-Second Street from the perspective of a camera mounted at the front of a subway car. Animetism can be seen in the way early travelogues were being shown in a movie theater shaped and decorated like the interior of a train. Nonetheless, as Charles Musser points out, the excitations generated from the spectator’s alignment with the machinic body and the fascination with lateral movements or relationships seen from a human body posited in the machine were combined as early as 1896 in The Great Train Robbery (Musser 1990, 352–5).

Since no other Chinese films that were made before 1922 have managed to survive, it is impossible for us to compare Laborer’s Love with its predecessors. Meanwhile, many film historians’ impression that the civilized play had encouraged early Chinese filmmakers to privilege static shots and theatricality is questionable. For instance, Liu Ping (2012, 255–61) argues that in the 1920s, leftwing theater artists in Japan had strongly influenced staging in China. For example, scenes that took place on modern transportation might employ stage designs that would create the impression of a movement from the back of the stage to the front, and such an impression was often enhanced by mobile lights that would suggest a forward movement. The idea of social dialectics was sometimes conveyed by dividing a stage into two narratively connected and geographically discrete locations, thus suggesting a form of “parallel editing” between the two spaces.

According to Hong Kong film scholar Lam Nin-tung, Zhang Shichuan recalled, “When I shot Nanfu nanqi [The Newly Weds, 1913], I only employed one camera distance, the long shot, in order to induce a milieu that is neither too far nor too close” (Cheng 1983, 133; quoted in Lam 1983, 64). Lam argues that Zhang Shichuan refers to a technique of painting proposed by artists and critics during the Six Dynasties (220 or 222–589), summarized famously by Guo Xi (1000–87). For Guo, a painting offers three relationships between the spectating body and the painted milieu: pingyuan (flat distance), gaoyuan (distance in height), and shenyuan (distance in depth). Each distance is best understood as a trajectory on which the spectator’s xin (consciousness) and the mu (gaze, which is part of the consciousness) you (navigates). Important details are to be placed at a medium distance on this trajectory. The consciousness, as a process of becoming, would then be motivated by the action at this medium distance to embark on a journey in this painting (Guo 1989, 19–23; quoted in Lam 1983, 62–3). Lam argues that for Zhang Shichuan, the mechanically static shots are not supposed to be perceived as stases. Rather, these shots are supposed to facilitate the spectator’s consciousness to journey within the frame. In other words, cinematism is embedded in animetism, and vice versa.

Laborer’s Love begins with a three-quarter shot (see Figure 1) of the fruit vendor trying to use his woodworking tools to open a watermelon. In this shot, the vendor is posited in the middle of the frame, at a medium distance between the spectator and the depth of the image. Although the spectator is invited to pay attention to the action, the consciousness (a formational process of becoming that consists of the changing relationships between the spectating body and the film image it perceives) is also invited by the abundance, variety, and aesthetically pleasing arrangement of various fruits to journey through a semicircle around the right side of the frame.^[4] Therefore, what appears to be a theatrical and animetic mise en scène is actually better seen as a form of cinematism. After the spectator’s consciousness has finished journeying the frame cinematically, the film cuts to a medium shot (see Figure 2), thus facilitating a movement in depth, which is again, as Thomas Lamarre argues, a form of cinematism.

Figure 1:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

Figure 2:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

Animetism proper is not used until two shots later, when the film cuts from a three-quarter shot of the fruit stall (an image similar to Figure 1), via an intertitle, to a long shot of a restaurant (see Figure 3). This is the first time a lateral movement, seen from the perspective of a human body conveyed by the machine (the camera), is suggested. Of course, within this shot, cinematism is still generated by the mise en scène and commotion around the cook, which invites the spectator to you or navigate cinematically within the frame.

Figure 3:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

The physical body of the spectator formally moves with the machine (the camera) by means of a cut from a three-quarter shot of the vendor shaving a sugar cane (an image similar to Figure 1) to a long shot of the fruit stall and part of the restaurant from the perspective of someone who watches them from across the street, from a position left (from the camera’s perspective) of the fruit stall (see Figure 4). This cut therefore enables the spectator’s body to travel across the street (cinematism). The film then cuts to a three-quarter shot of the doctor and his daughter (see Figure 5). This shot would be understood today as a point-of-view shot from the vendor’s perspective, as the vendor’s eyeline (from frame right to frame left) matches the camera’s slightly angled position (from frame right to frame left). Retrospectively, it also indicates that Figure 4 is probably seen from the perspective of the doctor’s shop. When the spectator has fully grasped the action between the doctor and the daughter (the daughter tries to measure her father’s clothes), the film cuts “backward” to a long shot of the shop (see Figure 6), which enables the consciousness to journey from the action (posited at a medium distance between the spectator and the depth of frame) to the rest of the milieu.

Figure 4:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

Figure 5:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

Figure 6:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

The physical mobility of the spectator’s body as part of a moving machine (the camera, that is, cinematism) is then further enhanced when the vendor “invents” his messaging machine, with which he swings across the street to the doctor’s shop in order to send fruit to his lover. The messaging machine’s swinging back and forth across the street enables the spectator’s body to turn 180° each time. As the doctor’s daughter accidentally puts her father’s glasses into the swinging machine and sends it across the street to the vendor, the vendor picks up the glasses and wears them. The film cuts to a point-of-view shot of a blurry street framed by the glasses (see Figure 7). Zhang Zhen regards this shot as one of the most cinematic moments in the film, though the view it affords is an image created by two layered planes: the glasses and the street underneath the glasses. In other words, this shot provides a multiplaner view that is in fact a form of animetism.

Figure 7:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

By calling this shot a form of animetism, I do not mean that it is less “sophisticated.” Rather, this shot illustrates that what we usually call a cinematic innovation is sometimes achieved by animetism, that is, by temporarily suspending the spectator’s bodily alignment with a mobile machine and by repositing their body within a machine (either static or moving). In other words, such an innovation is attained by a configurational change in the relationship between the human and the machine.

This idea is well demonstrated by two narrational devices in the second half of the film. In the beginning of this section, the fruit vendor retires to his home. Before he goes to bed, he fantasizes himself “making love” to the doctor’s daughter. This fantasy is suggested by superimposing a blurry long shot of the vendor flirting with the young woman on the upper left of the frame onto a medium close up of the vendor grinning (supposed to be in response to the fantasy; see Figure 8). This fantasy suspends the physical movement of the camera and instead presents to the human body an image achieved by layering two different planes (that is, animetism).

Figure 8:

The opening sequence of Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, Zhang Shichuan, 1922].

Then, the film cuts back and forth between the nightclub upstairs, in which the customers are playing mahjong, and the vendor’s bedroom. The spatial contiguity between the nightclub and the vendor’s bedroom is suggested not only by a number of exterior shots the spectator has already seen before this point, but also by the various medium shots and close ups of the mahjong table and the image of the vendor listening to the noise. The spectator’s body is not aligned with the machinic body with a target in sight. Rather, it is posited in an elevator-like machinic movement, which conveys the spectator’s body up and down the building. Therefore, this mode of parallel editing (if we employ a term that is usually associated with Griffith) is in fact a mode of animetism, and the technique of using visual cues to create a “mental” sound bridge between images is also a common strategy in manga and anime.

5 Conclusion

The point of this essay is not to suggest that Zhang Zhen’s understanding of Laborer’s Love as a transitional film is questionable. Rather, we may want to rethink “transition” not in a linear and dialectical sense, a point that has in fact been well illustrated by Zhang Zhen’s own intervention. Therefore, what this essay does is to push her thesis further by introducing concepts in media philosophy and more recent historiographical discussion to our reading of the film and its associated milieu. Zhang Zhen’s thesis is built on an observation that in Shanghai, there was a transition from exhibiting films in teahouses to showing them in dedicated movie theaters. This shift of venue and spectatorship demanded filmmakers to transition from making attractions to cinema of narrative integration. But as Zhang Zhen illustrates, such a transition was not clear cut. Rather, Laborer’s Love reveals the layeredness and messiness of such a transition.

Yet, such a thesis of transitionality is based on an assumption that the cinema was a self-contained medium. Historically, Chinese filmmakers, critics, and spectators had never seen the cinema as such. Rather, the theater and the cinema were two separate but interdependently layered anthropotechnogenetic assemblages. This does not mean that they saw the theater as the ontological ground of the cinema. Rather, the theater and the cinema were to be understood as ontogenetically related. Moreover, there is no evidence that the Canton-Hong Kong region had been showing films in teahouses, and teahouse cultures in this region had its own tradition of appreciating performances of narrative integration. In other words, what Zhang Zhen regards as a transition may not be a contestation between two historical phases in the stylistic development of the cinema. Rather, I argue that she has identified a deeper tension in the way the human and the machine relate to each other, considered by Thomas Lamarre as a deep-structural tension between cinematism and animetism. This tension is not specific to the cinematic and animetic works of any particular historical period (even though how such tension is manifested and negotiated is historially specific). Rather, it represents two relationships between the human and the machine.

With this framework in mind, Laborer’s Love reveals a process of negotiation between cinematism and animetism. My analysis demonstrates that what appears to be highly theatrical and static images are in fact modes of cinematism, supported not by the cinematic technology itself, but also by an understanding of the relationship between human and technics from the Six Dynasties. Meanwhile, what historians regard as cinematic innovations are, interestingly, achieved by a suspension of cinematism in favor of animetism. In other words, perhaps what we tend to call the cinematic is an exception: a suspension of cinematism by suggesting a different way of relating the human body to the machine.