The Trouble with Theater: Cinema and the Geopolitics of Medium Specificity

As media proliferate, mutate, and commingle at accelerated and unprecedented speed and scale today, the identity of cinema haunts us, perhaps more than other moments in history, with an intensified urgency on which hinges the stakes of the field, its legitimacy, and its ongoing legacy. This has stimulated a resurgent interest in the question of the medium, whether in terms of its persistent or changing specificity or its ongoing interaction with other media, with their mutual transmutation or convergence to the point of their obsolescence, pushing us to claims of the post-medium age paradoxically caught in the storm of New Media. While the question of the medium continues to concern us, even in gestures of its disavowal and overcoming, rarely have these discussions gone beyond the dominant focus of Europe and North America, both in terms of the scope of historical and contemporary instances and critical conceptions. What if we shift our viewfinder slightly off center while tracking into the thickness of history? Will the notion of medium and medium specificity still matter and, if so, in what ways? What were the alternative notions and conceptions that arose in other cultural contexts? How do these discussions help us rethink our current debates and assumptions?

To look beyond the dominant focus on American and European film theory is not simply a matter of geographical relocation. Rather, it necessarily engages the question of “where is film theory?” with “what constitutes the object as such?” and calls our attention to the interdependence between these two sets of inquiries.¹ By looking beyond the dominant center, we are forced to question the very parameters and institutions of film theory; in effect, we are also asked to look beyond the more familiar settings and rethink the boundaries between film theory and film history, film criticism and film practice, and film history and media history.

In the following, I will conduct a small case study by tracing the question of the cinematic medium in twentieth century China to explore the methodological issues we encounter when we move our attention to film theories elsewhere. My particular interest is to step back from a materialist ontology of medium and medium specificity to ask instead what cultural and political discourses such ontological accounts participate in, and what alternative notions played equally important roles in understandings of medium and medium specificity.

I will situate this inquiry more specifically in the historical debates on film and theater in several key moments in twentieth century China from the 1920s to the 1950s. As the shifting medium boundary between film and theater mobilized a historical problematic in constituting cinema and its political stakes at different moments in China, the border between theory and practice also became increasingly porous. These designations, I show, are not isolated contemplations, but are deeply embedded in transnational circulation of knowledge, along with a growing sensitivity to the changing mediality of film and theater with regard to media technology and aesthetic, and their social and political attunement.

Just as we look toward the periphery to redefine the center of film theory, in China as well as in a number of countries, the discourse of cinema’s medium specificity has largely evolved around working out its distinctions against its dominant other, theater. As cinema’s own status shifted from an emerging new medium to an established commercial institution to a problematic foreigner in modern China, cinema’s distinctions were articulated in relation to theater in various ways that give us a glimpse into the cultural and political investment in notions of the medium that have always been with us but which we choose to circumvent in favor of examining these notions’ material trappings and philosophical underpinnings. These discussions not only concern the medium others of cinema, more specifically, theater and its changing identities, but the geopolitical permutations that recast the dynamic between the two media. How the discourse of medium specificity became entwined with geopolitics, which eventually points to the geopolitics of film theory, is what I would like to pursue in this paper.

Departing from Theater: Cinema as an Emerging Medium...