Recently, On the Margins of Realism: Tracing Alternative Aesthetics in a Century of Chinese Cinema, a monograph by Luo Ting, a researcher under the Hundred Talents Program at our College of Media and International Culture, was published by Routledge.

Synopsis

Challenging realism as the dominant discourse in Chinese film studies, this work uncovers long-neglected alternative aesthetic traditions across a century of cinematic history. Luo argues that from early silent films to post-millennium cinema, Chinese cinema has sustained a parallel aesthetic lineage that both tensions and dialogues with realism.

The five-chapter book traces these alternatives to China’s indigenous shadow-play ontology, examining four recurring motifs: dream sequences, doppelgänger figures, media reflexivity, and allegorical spaces. Treating individual films as sites where historical and aesthetic forces collide, it explores cinema’s entanglement with subjectivity, nationhood, and cultural identity in China’s modern experience. The monograph expands discussions on Chinese film ontology, remaps its aesthetic cartography, and pioneers new pathways for understanding non-Western modernist artistic expression.

Peer Reviews

Anonymous international scholars praised:

Spanning broader historical scope than most existing works, this study combines theoretical insight with historical context while offering incisive close readings. As a formalist, abstract, and subjectivist counter-history to realism-centric narratives, it fills a critical gap and will resonate across Anglophone and Sinophone academia... Its contribution to urgently needed non-Western modernist and avant-garde scholarship is particularly exhilarating.

Providing fresh perspectives for English-language Chinese film historiography, especially on early cinema’s transnational connections, this book’s interrogation of realism’s alternatives invites us to reimagine Chinese film history itself.

Author Profile

Luo Ting, Ph.D. (University of Auckland), is a doctoral supervisor and Zhejiang Province Zhejiang Youth Social Science Scholar. Her research spans film studies, visual culture, and media studies. She has led projects funded by the National Social Science Fund and Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy & Social Science Planning Office. Her publications appear in Journal of Film and Video, Critical Arts, Literary Review, and Journal of Beijing Film Academy, among others.