Book Talk: The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema

Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. This talk introduces Dr. Pao-chen Tang’s new book, which theorizes and analyzes this animist imagination: a new mode of filmmaking that delves into both the definition of the cinematic medium and how to live with the nonhuman. Moving images are animate beings and the animism of cinema further compels an eye-opening vision to examine East Asian history and ecological anxieties of our times. The shamanic protagonists of the animist imagination transform the worldly and medial figurations onscreen into thought experiments on human-nonhuman relationality, modelling for the viewers anti-anthropocentric forms of existence and action. The book distills this form of agency through a systematic analysis of narrative structures, stylistic devices, and cultural implications in a stunning demonstration of a world viewed and enacted otherwise.
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Dr. Pao-Chen Tang
Pao-chen Tang is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He received a joint PhD in Cinema and Media Studies & East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema (2025) and co-editor of Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media (2025). Several of his publications have been recognized with major awards from film studies and environmental humanities associations. Most recently, The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema has been shortlisted for the 2026 BAFTSS Best First Monograph.
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HYBRID EVENT
Please note this both a live (in-person) and online event.
In person: UNSW Kensington, Morven Brown (C20) L2, room 209
Online on Teams: Join the meeting
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CONTACT

For all enquiries, please email [email protected]

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