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This chapter examines the scale of the national used to occupy the central attention in film studies and argues that the resulting myth of a unified national cinema in a given nation-state must be demystified. It first reconceptualizes Chinese cinema in relation to the shifting problematics of national cinema and transnational film studies in both the theoretical and historical contexts. It then considers interdisciplinarity in Chinese film studies in the West and how it benefits audience study, along with the thorny issues of piracy and cross-mediality. It also discusses film studies from a different perspective than transnationalism and speculates on what might be gained from comparative film studies, arguing that it is a subfield larger than transnational film studies. The chapter urges scholars to move beyond the national cinema paradigm and to explore the transnational and comparative frameworks of film studies.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s unique regional focus that distinguishes its approach from scholarly works that have regarded Asian cinema predominantly from a national cinema perspective. The chapter outlines the book’s innovative methodology derived from comparative film studies and inter-Asia cultural studies approaches.

The concept “approaching reality” is defined and a connection between it and the Bazinian ontology is established. I also explicate the various terms used in China during this period to frame the critical debates on the cinema and their conceptual implications in a cross-cultural intellectual dialogue.

I trace the definitions of “approaching reality” back to the critical discussions by two filmmakers in the 1920s, Gu Kenfu and Hou Yao, to open up a comparative space between early Chinese film thinking and Bazanian ontology, and discuss the various problems in comparative studies.

I discuss the history and theoretical debates of the Hong Kong Cantoese sound film in the 1930s, an art form that was conflated ontologically with the Cantonese theatre as an art of ideation: a form of “play” that “puts into play” contesting human relationships and political ideas.

I investigate into the theoretical writings and films of director Fei Mu (Fey Mou) and examine his interests in representing the quotidian in its mundanity. In so doing, time, desire and life are made palpable in the cinematographic image.

I study the soft film theory in the 1930s by contextualizing it within the cross-cultural intellectual debate on life and art, and analyse how this aesthetic debate sees the cinema as a biomimetic machine that negotiates the relationship between life, biological life and national life.

I examine—in dialogue with Eurpean Marxists and Deleuze—the Marxist film theory in Shanghai in the 1930s and its notion of cinematographic consciousness—an idea that suggests that cinema can sense, feel, think and instill its consciousness to the sentient bodies of the viewers.

I use the idea “approaching reality” to extend my discussion to the ontological, sociological and ethical consequences of the digital image, and eventually rethink what it means by cinema ontology in Buddhist terms.