Cinephilia Reconsidered: Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era

Emerging Chinese art cinema director Bi Gan’s latest work, Kuang ye shi dai (Resurrection, 2025), reads like a final letter to cinema. Throughout the story, Bi intertwines the history of world cinema with China’s modernisation to narrate his own genealogy of cinephilia. In the animated sequence at the end of the film, the audience seated in the wax-made movie theatre gradually disappears, and the seats collapse into ruin. In my view, this symbolises the director’s fatalistic view of cinema’s death and cinephilia – a requiem of sorts – and his unstable auteur position, given the rapid growth of AI in the Chinese entertainment industry.¹ In an era where digital technology has arguably become another organ of humans, technological advancements no longer startle us. Cinephilia is now a heterogeneous concept. Similar to auteurism, it has the potential for both elite and grassroots coexistence and needs to consider uneven media development in underdeveloped regions. Yet, an elegiac undercurrent continues to hover over the two concepts’ domains. 

Since Susan Sontag’s famous essay, The Decay of Cinema, published in 1996, contemporary art films have addressed the rhetoric of the “death of cinema” roughly every decade.² For example, Bu san (Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang, 2003) was conceived by the filmmaker’s own cinephilic nostalgia;³ Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012) cross-references various classical films and satirises digitalised contemporary cinema, showing an “all-pervasive cinephilia”.⁴ Three decades after the publication of Sontag’s essay, we remain haunted by this perceived sense of loss, not to mention the “death of the author” that has been circulating since 1968, as argued by Roland Barthes.⁵ 

It is the persistent rhetoric of death that Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era: Film Authorship Rethought catches my attention because she juxtaposes two theoretical frameworks that have both been long overshadowed by the discourse of demise, mapping their survival and mutation under the current digital media landscape. Lau argues that the success of Asian directors on the global stage, as evidenced by international film festival awards, relies heavily on digital platforms and streaming media. Driven by a participatory culture, a director’s image is constituted by both their authorial voice and cinephiles’ platform-based engagements, including film reviews, mashups, and spoof videos that reinterpret the director’s intent. Although social media networks are predominantly concentrated in Euro-American regions, Lau adopts a cosmopolitan perspective to encompass Chinese applications operating within a more complicated media environment, such as video platform Bilibili, and cinephilic platform Douban, which is similar to Letterboxd and IMDb. 

Lau’s methodological contribution lies in her direct engagement with real audiences, namely her analysis of user-generated content and non-participant observation across various platforms, albeit this engagement might sound somewhat self-evident to many outsiders of film studies. Although film studies have several theories of spectatorship, these have traditionally derived from “textual analysis, analogies or personal introspection,” rather than genuine interactions with actual viewers (p. 13). Cinephilia scholar Belén Vidal suggests that digital cinephilia has arguably become another expression of participatory culture.⁶ Film scholarship has long maintained a cautious attitude towards audience participation. On the one hand, this is likely to draw a clear line to media studies, while on the other hand, there is a pervasive concern that neoliberalism might infiltrate film studies, given that marketing constitutes an important facet of shaping participatory culture. I concur with Lau’s approach, as the contemporary media environment compels us to set these concerns aside. 

The book is structured around six parallel chapters, each analysing user-generated content associated with an East Asian auteur on a specific digital platform. In Chapter One, Lau focuses on the parodic, humorous, and playful alternative representation of Wong Kar-wai’s auteur brand on Bilibili. While academia and the global film industry mainly position Wong as a highly transnational filmmaker or representative of Hong Kong cinema, Lau contends that he has increasingly become connected to the People’s Republic of China not only through industrial financing but also through personal ties rooted in his birthplace, Shanghai. Having originated from Japanese ACG (anime, comics, games) culture, Bilibili is characterised by its danmaku – bullet comments that roll across the video. A major highlight of this chapter lies in revealing the convergence between high and low cultures. This is exemplified by the mash-up of Chongqing senlin (Chungking Express, 1994) and the northeastern grassroots comedy television series Ma da shuai (Ma Dashuai, Zhao Benshan, 2003-2005), which orchestrates a jarring sense of the absurd. This pastiche deconstructs the elitist film aesthetics attached to Wong’s authorship. Another contribution of the chapter is to highlight the amateur in cinephilia, which is traditionally associated with professionals and cultural elites. A Bilibili user precisely replicated Wong’s visual style in their own short films and earned validation within the online cinephilic community via danmaku feedback. This can be linked to Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “politics of the amateur” (la politique de l’amateur).⁷ This is celebrated by Girish Shambu and Nico Baumach as a contemporary motto of digital cinephilia, illuminating how the web democratises access to once exclusive cinephilic circles.⁸ Yet, the manifestation of this amateur politics is far more complex in China. Due to the state’s governance of the internet, this digitally enabled amateur politics is precluded from ever evolving into an idealised utopia. 

Jia Zhangke’s reception on Douban, though examined in Chapter Four, reflects the tension between state governance and independent filmmaking. Jia’s early “homeland trilogy” – Xiao wu (Pickpocket, 1997), Zhan tai (Platform, 2000), and Ren xiao yao (Unknown Pleasures, 2002) – is renowned for depicting the struggles of marginal figures during China’s socio-economic transformation and for its realistic style, which established his auteur status. However, as he gradually gained official recognition, Jia began to negotiate with the government. For instance, Tian zhu ding (A Touch of Sin, 2013) started moving towards the mainstream and commercialisation. Douban, a platform I have used since my earliest encounters with cinema, has long functioned as one of the most important online spaces for Chinese cinephiles. It has also imposed strict censorship in recent years. My own experience of being banned for seven days after mentioning the Reform and Opening-up in a comment on Ping yuan shang de mo xi (Why Try to Change Me Now, Zhang Dalei, 2023) suggests how ordinary cinephilic commentary can become entangled with platform censorship.⁹ However, Douban still retains a “culture of contention,” as Lau notes, borrowing Yang Guobin’s term (p. 90).¹⁰ Netizens frequently question various authorities, such as elites, commercialisation, and the government. In recent years, public opinion in China has gradually shifted towards a nationalist inclination, namely anti-self-orientalism. This is mainly evident in the reviews of Jiang hu er nu (Ash Is Purest White, 2018), in which netizens argue that Jia’s exposure of Chinese social reality is meant to cater to the tastes of European film festival jurors (p. 93). Jia’s contested auteur identity likewise extends beyond the film texts. The Pingyao International Film Festival (PYIFF), founded by Jia himself, is a commercially operated and government-supported festival. His withdrawal from and re-engagement with PYIFF in 2020 and 2021, respectively, are perceived as a continuous tug-of-war with the government. Lau argues that this breaks the simplistic binary opposition of “suppression and resistance” in traditional Western perspectives, demonstrating how post-indie directors negotiate among state power, commercial imperatives, and auteur voice (p. 99). This is not limited to Chinese independent cinema, as Feng Xiaogang’s career trajectory demonstrates. Feng’s intimacy with the government and commercial cinema even makes his auteur status a matter of controversy. Under such an environment, cinephiles’ practices are also full of negotiation and contention.

Moving beyond mass platforms in China, Lau also turns to transnational, niche, and sometimes elite cinephilic spaces. Ozu Yasujirō, analysed in Chapter Two, remains an active research object in both Japanese film scholarship and contemporary film curation. For instance, the BFI organised “A Family Affair, The Films of Yasujiro Ozu” film programme in 2023, and Ozu’s films continue to be screened regularly in London cinemas.¹¹ In Lau’s argument, Ozu’s digital afterlife is constituted through a form of cinephilic commemoration jointly produced by top-down scholarly interpretation disseminated via Criterion DVDs and bottom-up participatory engagements on Letterboxd. This chapter most vividly demonstrates the heterogeneity of contemporary cinephilia by foregrounding the coexistence of elite discourse, grassroots practices, academic interpretation, and vernacular forms of engagement. Reviews on Letterboxd frequently move beyond the film text itself (a tendency equally observable on Douban). For example, one user, reflecting on Tōkyō Monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), confesses a sense of guilt about neglecting their mother due to an excessive devotion to film‑watching, which subsequently sparks a wider discussion about how to parent through cinema (p. 56). Such mutations in film commentary suggest that cinephilia is not a unified system of knowledge or taste. On a transnational platform like Letterboxd, cinephiles’ viewing experiences can stem from various modes of access. These range from “classical” pathways, such as exposure through film festivals and restored Blu-ray editions, to delayed encounters with film history via informal routes, including piracy and online downloads. The democratic story narrated by digital cinephilia often ignores the uneven development of global media infrastructures. In this sense, authorship no longer functions as a stable source of meaning but is continuously reconfigured under differing conditions of cultural capital and accessibility. 

By contrast, Chapter Six extends this heterogeneity into the domain of gender and taste-making by discussing Sylvia Chang. As the only female director examined in the book, her inclusion also implicitly underscores the extent to which auteur discourse remains, unfortunately, dominated by men. MUBI, which can be understood as an elite, cinephile-driven platform, is not framed by Lau in simple opposition between elitist and anti-elitist positions. Instead, she attends to how processes of taste-making enable Chang to move beyond her established star persona and to be rearticulated as an auteur figure, thereby challenging a field historically shaped by white male dominance.

Finally, Chapters Three and Five, on Bong Joon-ho and Anthony Chen, respectively, unpack a long-standing tension between cinephilia and fandom. In the Introduction, Lau distinguishes cinephiles from fans, although she ultimately acknowledges that the boundary between the two has become increasingly blurred and elusive. Cinephiles usually imagine themselves as being above fandom, marked by a sense of superiority and distinction. Moreover, cinephiles may not necessarily be interested in reappropriating, remaking or re-enacting cultural texts, whereas these are central practices of fandom. This distinction sits somewhat uneasily with Lau’s chapter on Wong Kar-wai, although Lau describes such practices as the “fannish use of auteur-produced or -related images” (p. 13). In the present media environment, however, drawing a clear line between cinephilia and fandom may not be necessary, since both are now targeted by the market.¹² Their relationship is better understood as a spectrum rather than a binary opposition. Bong’s #BongHive fandom demonstrates this point. These groups are highly engaged in creating and circulating internet memes. For instance, they widely circulated images of Bong making his Oscars statuettes kiss, often accompanied by humorous captions, and downloaded or remixed the “Jessica Jingle” from Gisaengchung (Parasite, 2019) as a mobile phone ringtone. Yet these activities remain closely tied to the celebration of Bong’s cinematic achievements, and do not involve the fan wars commonly associated with fandom. This suggests that cinephilia and fandom can remain distinct while also overlapping. Viewers may have both identities at the same time.

The chapter on Anthony Chen complicates this issue from another direction. Chen’s auteur persona is constructed less through fan circulation than through his own self-presentation on Facebook, X and Instagram. Lau examines how he presents family life, fatherhood, civic responsibilities, and concern for global issues on these platforms, thereby extending his authorship beyond the film text into a more everyday, ethically inflected public image. Here, the tension between cinephilia and fandom is manifested through audiences’ sustained attention to the director’s private image, moral stance and public identity. Interest in Chen’s films gradually becomes entangled with the imagination of him as a father, citizen and transnational artist, while the auteur himself actively participates in producing a self that can be recognised, followed, and consumed. Together, these two chapters further substantiate the book’s central argument: in the media platform era, authorship cannot be fixed within the film text or reduced to directorial intention. It must be understood as a negotiated process jointly produced by platforms, audiences, fan labour and the auteur’s own acts of self-presentation.

However, the book’s strength also points to its limitation. Lau productively uses cinephilia to complicate auteurism, but the former is at times treated in a relatively flattened manner. As a flexible, difficult-to-define umbrella term, cinephilia enables Lau to bring film reviews, memes, mash-ups, fan labour, taste-making, and social media self-presentation into the same account of authorship. Yet because the concept is so capacious, the differences between various cinephilic practices still require further theorisation. The issue is not simply that cinephilia takes multiple forms in the platform era, but that these forms do not emerge under equal conditions. Some cinephiles enter film history through recognised channels such as festival screenings, restored Blu-ray editions, Criterion DVDs or MUBI, while others encounter world cinema through pirated VCDs, online downloads, subtitling communities and informal circulation. Seemingly more commercial or popular tastes do not necessarily indicate a lack of cinephilia. These tastes may be shaped by limited access resulting from censorship, market supply, geographical location, economic conditions and media infrastructure. Lau’s discussion of platformised cinephilia therefore provides a set of timely case studies for the de-elitisation of cinephilia, while its internal inequalities, structured by cultural capital, legitimacy and media access, remain an important question for future research.

This limitation becomes evident in the discussion of technological change. In the conclusion, Lau points out that digital platforms have already transformed the relationship between auteurism and cinephilia, and that new technological developments, especially AI, will continue to reshape film culture in unpredictable ways (pp. 156-57). However, when we repeatedly explain the mutation of cinephilia through technological innovation, do we risk slipping into technological determinism? Returning to the “death of cinema” argument that haunts the opening of this review, Francesco Casetti’s redefinition of cinema offers a useful corrective. Casetti critiques the tendency to reduce cinema to a specific media apparatus: if cinema is defined only by celluloid, the projector and the darkened auditorium, then the rise of digital images, domestic viewing, mobile phones and tablet screens can easily be understood as signs of cinema’s decline, or even its death.¹³ By contrast, Casetti understands cinema as a cultural form capable of relocating and surviving across different environments, with its significance lying in the ways it continues to shape and stimulate viewing experience.¹⁴ Rather than simply asking how new technologies allow us to reconsider cinephilia, then, the more urgent question may be: within these platformised and technologised networks, whose cinephilia becomes visible, legitimised and preserved, and whose love of cinema remains invisible, informal or unrecognised?

Dorothy Wai Sim Lau, East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era: Film Authorship Rethought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025).

Endnotes