What do we mean by the term “film theory”? Usually, as Victor Fan points out at the beginning of his book, various comprehensive explanatory models of cinema, developed across a carefully defined corpus of texts, all composed by a coterie of Euro-American scholars. Chinese-language scholarship has largely been excluded from this canon. And yet, Chinese intellectuals and filmmakers have written about cinema since the medium's emergence. Though Fan argues that such writing is often more akin to vernacular criticism than grand theory, it has nonetheless conducted a distant and unacknowledged debate with those figures at the core of the Western tradition. Cinema Approaching Reality seeks to reopen this conversation, putting Chinese film theorists from the 1920s to the 1940s in dialogue with their Euro-American counterparts. The book thus seeks to locate Chinese film theory twice over: first, vis-à-vis the Euro-American tradition with which film scholars are largely familiar; and second, in relation to the complex social and political currents that shaped how cinema as a medium was understood during the Republican era.

As Fan outlines in the Introduction, the book's key point of reference is the French critic André Bazin. Bazin's work is traditionally associated with the theory of photographic indexicality, but has undergone a reassessment following the digital transition. No longer understood as the guaranteed link between a photographic image and its referent, the index has been reinterpreted as a marker of the ultimate incommensurability of the two. How to understand this gap between the cinematic image and the material world is, Fan suggests, the question that animates both Western film theory after Bazin and Republican-era film theory in China. The Chinese term bizhen, which Fan glosses as “approaching reality,” captures this sense of cinema as lifelike but not exactly like life. It is bizhen’s various reconfigurations in the hands of different theorists that the book primarily explores.

Chapter one considers early Chinese “shadow play” theory. Chinese scholars such as Chen Xihe and Zhong Dafeng, writing in the 1980s, sought to emphasize the distinctiveness of early Chinese film theory, arguing that it advanced a primarily theatrical ontology of cinema, rather than one that was image-based and thus Bazinian. Fan suggests that, on the contrary, 1920s' theorists such as Hou Yao and Gu Kenfu understood the cinematic image, like Bazin, as a potential that could come close to, but never actualize, reality. This was bizhen. Chapter two moves on to Marxist film theory in the 1930s. Tracking the arrival of Lenin's theory of consciousness into semi-colonial Shanghai via Japan, Fan argues that the work of Lu Xun, Shen Xiling and critics writing in Star Monthly magazine, represents an explicitly political reformulation of bizhen through which the model of an engaged Leftist cinema was developed. Central to this process was the concept of yishi – usually translated as “consciousness” – a term which allows for comparison between 1930s' film theory in China, and, primarily, 1970s' apparatus theory in France. Chapter three considers “soft film” theory, as advanced in Modern Screen magazine between 1933 and 1934. Originally developed as a reaction against “hard” Marxist film theory, “soft film” theory reworked bizhen as an aesthetic experience during which spectator and cinematic image would become one. Fan reads this in relation to Buddhist reconfigurations of Kant, Weimar film theory of the 1920s and 1930s, and ultimately Gilles Deleuze, while emphasizing that “soft film” theory was also a response to the political events of the period. Chapter four is an analysis of Fei Mu's writing on cinema, as well as his films Springtime in a Small Town and Confucius. Comparing Fei's theories of kongqi (air) and xuanxiang (suspension-imagination) to the work of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Christian Metz, and Bazin, Fan argues that Fei's sense of bizhen – specifically, cinema's ability to make present an absence – underpins both his filmic aesthetics and his response to the political desolation of post-war Shanghai. The final chapter covers early Cantonese sound film in Hong Kong in the 1930s and 1940s. Here, the focus is on how theories of performance and music developed in Cantonese theatre influenced this cinema's approach to reality as a state of play. Sound and music were critical to this effect. The conclusion wraps up by considering the nature of the digital image, but through a Buddhist reading of cinematic ontology.

Cinema Approaching Reality is a dense and complex book. Its enormous intellectual and historical range requires concentrated effort to absorb. With so much packed into a single manuscript, the argument moves nimbly; while the Chinese texts are beautifully contextualized, their Euro-American equivalents are located more elusively, with the connections between them sometimes less immediately obvious to this reader. Nevertheless, as the first monograph in English to treat Chinese film theory so thoroughly, this is a ground-breaking work that sets the standard for subsequent research on the subject. It should be required reading for anyone interested in comparative film theory and the history of Chinese cinema.