Presentation Schedule
From Puzzle to Shanshui (Landscape Painting): Inexhaustible Space and the Limits of Retrospective Attribution in Bi Gan’s Cinema (112610)
Session Chair: David Toohey
Wednesday, 11 November 2026 16:10
Session: Session 4
Room: Room C (4F)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
This article reconsiders Bi Gan’s cinema by shifting the analytical focus from puzzle-solving to shanshui (landscape painting)-based spatial experience. In this study, "retrospective attribution" refers to the viewer’s attempt to reorganize repeated objects, doubled figures, unstable memories, and temporal disjunctions into a coherent causal order. "Inexhaustible pictorial space" refers to a landscape structure that can be entered and explored but not fully mastered by a single act of vision. Through close reading and shot-level formal analysis, this article examines the long-take journey through Dangmai in Kaili Blues (2015) and the 3D dream sequence in Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018). It focuses on how mobile camera movement, partial disclosure, off-screen implication, spatial transition, and temporal deferral transform narrative uncertainty into an open field of perceptual wandering. The argument is that Bi’s films initially activate puzzle spectatorship by encouraging viewers to reconstruct hidden causal relations; however, these acts of reconstruction do not produce final narrative mastery. Instead, the films redirect interpretive desire toward a shanshui-like mode of spectatorship, in which cinematic space and time unfold as inexhaustible landscapes. By connecting Chinese landscape aesthetics with film-form analysis, the article advances existing studies of Bi Gan beyond dream logic and complex narration, proposing a cross-media framework for understanding cinematic transcendence as an experiential effect generated through perception, movement, and spatial openness.
Authors:
Yu Yang, University of Lisbon, Portugal
About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Yu Yang is a tenure-track lecturer in theatre and film at Zhengzhou University, China.
Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yu-Yang-304
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