Time: November 13th, 2025
Speaker: Julia Keblinska (Cambridge)
Title: “Garden Cinema and New Media in China's 1980s”
Abstract:
China's so-called "New Era" (1978-1989) is well known as a moment of economic and social reform--it was also crucially a transitional media moment in which both old and new technologies worked together to represent and mediate the emergence of a new future. This talk considers how Romance on Mt. Lu (1980), a dazzling widescreen melodrama and one of the New Era’s biggest blockbusters interacted with the idea of a "new" urban movie theater, outfitted with new audiovisual technologies and designed to interact dynamically with the grand boulevards of a modernized city. Faced with competition from television (and other modes of emergent urban entertainment), the New Era film industry responded by reforming cinematic experience; studios doubled down on widescreen spectacle and entertainment genres while architects designed new types of cinemas that could accommodate larger screen formats and stereophonic sound. New movie theaters were built to deliver visual spectacle while cinemagoing was redefined as one among many urban pleasures. New cinematic complexes were thus simultaneously immersive and distracting spaces, intended to brim with the visual pleasures of film and the sensuous indulgence of coffee shops and music venues. Like color television, another new medium of the Chinese 1980s, this new type of movie theater was desired but only gradually available to urban consumers. Nevertheless, a different medium was able to stand in for the experience of the built environment of the new cinema. This talk considers how the “pleasure garden” mode of postsocialist film was anticipated and thematized by a 1980 hit that only the most privileged of film goers would have seen in theaters equipped to do it aesthetic justice. An extended formal analysis of the film demonstrates how the widescreen aesthetic of the film (its immersive, cinematic logic) develops in relation to its indulgence in consumer technology (the multimedial, distracted mode of viewing). I show that the rural resort complex at the center of the film, the “pleasure garden,” is not as pastoral as it initially seems, but rather, functions like an urban leisure space much like the ideal type of theater designed for the New Era. Cinematic pleasure is thus constituted by the interplay of consumer electronics, visions of urban renewal, and cinematic technology. Much like the a theme park , Mt. Lu emerges in the 1980s as a technologically mediated space that anticipates contemporary interactive media logic.
Bio:
Julia Keblinska is assistant professor of Asian Cinema in Film and Screen Studies, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at Cambridge. She has previously worked as a postdoctoral scholar, lecturer, and visiting scholar at the Ohio State University, where she became the content co-editor of the Chinese Theater Collaborative digital humanities project. She received her PhD in Chinese, with a Designated Emphasis in the Department of Film and Media, from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley.
