Automobiles, screens and the Sinosphere

Abstract

Abstract Film scholars writing about the Euro-American context note the strong historical and technical links between films and automobiles. Chinese cinema scholars have traced the relationship between mobile digital video (DV) recording devices and new interdisciplinary approaches to artmaking and filmmaking. However, the literature has yet to examine how this matrix of technologies operates in contemporary moving images produced in the Sinosphere. This article establishes a genealogy from cars-on-screen to screens-in-cars with examples from Jia Zhangke, Guan Hu and Huang Hsin-Yao and the lens-based works of Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei. In contrast, microfilms produced by BMW and Cadillac trade on neoliberal notions of the freedom on the open road, and the name recognition of Sinophone directors and stars to sell automobiles. Theoretically underpinning this work is Friedrich Kittler’s definition of media as techniques of transmission, processing, and archiving of information; moreover, George Seigel’s insights into the forensic qualities of media are read in relation to future evidentiary use of dashcam footage. In sum, the article focuses on mobilized vision enabled by cameras in cars, and demonstrates how these are manifest in the anxieties of fraud, the potentiality for violence, and the need to record the road.