Electric shadows reloaded: the post-digital animateur, shadow play and handmade cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe lingering shadows (ying) in the word for cinema (dianying) did not seem to have a significant impact in Chinese film studies, which have been predominantly preoccupied with indexicality and issues related to realism. By bringing these shadows into focus, this essay reflects on the handmade nature of the moving images as key to better framing and understanding some of the most recent developments in Chinese digital animation. In the work of an increasingly visible number of solo producers (i.e. the post-digital animateurs), the moving image is more intimately connected to the human creator/manipulator/performer, rather than the technological medium (be it the kinoeye, the film strip or the digital software). Reframing their animations within the broader temporal and spatial context of handmade cinema, I explore a longstanding, but largely unscrutinized, connection between cinema and the performative apparatus of the shadow play to sketch a parallax story – rather than a parallel history – of manipulated and evocative moving images that are not contained in the institution of cinema and do not submit themselves to the supremacy of the index. The animateur's moving images offer meaningful evidence of the important, albeit mostly unrecognized, role that animation can play in (Chinese) film studies, and more broadly, film theories.