Laborer’s Love: An Anthropotechnogenetic Mediation Between Cinematism and Animetism

Abstract

Abstract How can media philosophy help us rehistoricize Zhang Shichuan (director) and Zheng Zhengqiu’s (screenwriter) Laogong zhi aiqing [Laborer’s Love, 1922] and foster a deeper understanding of its aesthetics within its historical context? In this article, I take Zhang Zhen’s (1999, 27–50) book chapter on the film, “Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage Cinema,” as a point de départ of my investigation. I argue that Laborer’s Love is best understood as part of a larger media ecology that has always been in transition, or more properly speaking, always in a process of becoming. I want to demonstrate that in the film, the hybridity between a more presentational style that stemmed from early-twentieth-century Chinese theater and a more representational style that stemmed from American cinema may not be a symptom of the film’s transitionality. Rather, such hybridity might have been Zhang Shichuan’s conscious stylistic choice. Also, in the light of Thomas Lamarre’s understanding of the cinema as a negotiation between two relationships between the human and the machine—cinematism (an alignment between the human body and the moving trajectory of the machine) and animetism (a positing of the body within a moving machine)—we can rethink the film as an anthropotechnical mediation between these two relationships.