Cinema at the table, cinema as roundtable

Abstract

Despite its great physical or symbolic weight in the studies of architecture and design, the table, especially the roundtable in cinema—and its place in the history and historiographies of moving images—remains overlooked and undertheorized. This essay aims to provide an overview of why the notion of the roundtable is integral to our examination of global Chinese cinephilia throughout the special issue. To that end, the essay suggests the need to understand the table on and offscreen before we historicize the roundtable within the cinemascape. The relationship between cinema and the table as a spatial metaphor, a mode of framing, and as infrastructure is highlighted. Particularly important is how the roundtable stands out as a critical lens through which we create space for further historiographic thinking about cinema. In the essay, Roundtable Cinephilia is a working concept to acknowledge a variety of flexible cinephilic encounters across time, space, and scale, as well as across print, audiovisual, electronic, and digital platforms; it should also point to the possibility of reorientation through border-crossing experiences and encounters. In short, the essay recognizes the roundtable as a global intermedial genre, an analytical category particularly exemplified within and across the Chinese and Sinophone cinephile communities. Rather than how people gather or how they are seated around the roundtable, the most pressing question addressed in the essay, then, is whether we can have a roundtable, or common ground, not just around which to sit together, but also from where to stand up, leave, and reorient ourselves. Drawing on the special issue, we hope in this way to have taken steps toward enacting, more than just proposing, what cinema as roundtables can do.