Cinema Illuminating Reality

"A stunning and provocative sequel to the invaluable Cinema Approaching Reality , this book is at once audacious and scrupulous, a Promethean leap of critical imagination as substantively grounded as Talmudic exegesis. Victor Fan deftly and relevantly engages thinkers from Nāgārjuna to Deleuze without reducing these inquiries to an Asian fusion buffet, maintaining lucid explications of Buddhist tenets while daring cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogues that will engage the philosopher and the cinephile. The readings of Marcel CarnÉ’s Le jour se lÈve and Christian Petzhold’s Transit alone are worth the price of admission. A thrilling intellectual experience that demonstrates that inquiry can and should be an adventure."-Earl Jackson, Asia University

"What if Buddhism and not Bazin or Deleuze were made the foundation for film philosophy? What conceptual and geopolitical reorientations would this require of us, and what new kinds of film experience would this open onto? These are the questions that animate this astonishingly inventive work, whose nearest cousin may be either Deleuze’s Cinema books or Barthes’s Camera Lucida ."-Marc Steinberg, author of The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet

"A stunning and provocative sequel to the invaluable Cinema Approaching Reality , this book is at once audacious and scrupulous, a Promethean leap of critical imagination as substantively grounded as Talmudic exegesis. Victor Fan deftly and relevantly engages thinkers from Nāgārjuna to Deleuze without reducing these inquiries to an Asian fusion buffet, maintaining lucid explications of Buddhist tenets while daring cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogues that will engage the philosopher and the cinephile. The readings of Marcel CarnÉ’s Le jour se lÈve and Christian Petzhold’s Transit alone are worth the price of admission. A thrilling intellectual experience that demonstrates that inquiry can and should be an adventure."-Earl Jackson, Asia University

"What if Buddhism and not Bazin or Deleuze were made the foundation for film philosophy? What conceptual and geopolitical reorientations would this require of us, and what new kinds of film experience would this open onto? These are the questions that animate this astonishingly inventive work, whose nearest cousin may be either Deleuze’s Cinema books or Barthes’s Camera Lucida ."-Marc Steinberg, author of The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet

Victor Fan is reader in film and media philosophy in the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London. He is author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minnesota, 2015) and Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media .