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Reviews

The life of all things is intertwined with the life of cinema in The Animist Imagination—even as it is overcast by ecological decline. Tang’s exhilarating exploration of a seminal cluster of East-Asian films reveals the cinema’s power to aesthetically mediate but also, more immediately, to imagine, to resurrect, to intimately share and relate human and non-human worlds. But while exploring the limits of the human, Tang’s approach is unapologetically humanist, insisting on the social sphere and on the political stakes of the films as, themselves, “archives” of our connectedness with the world, portals to shared experience, challenges to modernity’s disenchantments. Geo-historically specific and theoretically ambitious, the book advances through nuanced close analyses of exemplary films, reflecting on the potentialities of the medium and the longer history of moving images, while firmly grounded in our present condition. — Noa Steimatsky, author of Italian Locations and The Face on Film Balancing close analysis and theoretical insights, Tang (like a critical Wukong) reveals cinema's enduring capacity to define—and destabilize—what it means to be human. While the book's broader orientation is ecocritical, its methodology unfolds through an absorbing, imaginative dialogue with carefully selected films, proposing fiercely original ways of seeing classic works anew. —Shiao-Ying Shen, Associate Professor, National Taiwan University Through detailed readings of several East Asian films featuring in-depth analysis through elegant prose, the book makes an admirable contribution to the study of contemporary transnational cinema while also lending itself to ecocritical studies. The ideas are highly polished and the writing and documentation flawless. —Jason McGrath, Professor, University of Minnesota

Author Information

Pao-chen Tang is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He is the co-editor of Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media (2025).

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