Video Vices and Terminal Futures
See abstract for content note
This talk explores the emergence of the video format and the emergence of new, sensationalist cinematic genres, as they interact with the mediated spaces of urban cinema in late 1980s and 1990s China. While cinema in the first half of the 1980s dealt with competition from television, a relatively regulated medium, urban China at the turn of the decade became the proving ground for the more undisciplined medium of the videocassette. Instead of entertaining consumers at home, video was a semi-theatrical medium consumed in urban institutions known as video halls that became ubiquitous in the late 1980s and remained essential fixtures of urban life into the next decade. Video halls were seedy, semi-legal spaces in which mostly men watched mostly pulpy genres. Video content was often pirated: poorly copied, consumed and circulated with little regard for elite literary and cinematic taste. A late 80s explosion of violent and sexually suggestive video titles threatened the economic bottom line of Chinese cinema by tantalizing audiences with material that could not be shown in Chinese theaters. In response to audiovisual competition, the Chinese film industry indulged in remarkably (sexually) violent production. In my analysis of several significant late 80s films, The Last Frenzy (1987), The Price of Frenzy (1988), Samsara (1988), and The Yellow Specter of the Night (1989), I show how video and illicit genres were both pathologized and embraced to theorize a new embodied and anxious mode of spectatorship. The shocking exploits of video exploded onto the big screen just as the economic violence of the decade was about to come to a head in political upheaval. In turning to the culturally low and inhabiting the urban media margins, cinema evinced a dark turn in Chinese (media) history, failing to live up to the ideals of economic reform and repeatedly gesturing to social collapse. How do we understand this ‘end of cinema’ when we read it against the violent materiality of the video encounter?

Content note: The talk concerns films that feature sexual assault and strong violence. Images of characters in psychological and physical distress will be used to advance theoretical arguments about the relationship between video and body genres.

Dr Julia Keblinska is Assistant Professor of Asian Film and Media in Film & Screen Studies, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley and has previously worked at the Ohio State University.
Date: 2 December 2025, 17:00
Venue: Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Road OX2 6LU
Venue Details: Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre (lower ground floor)
Speaker: Dr Julia Keblinska (University of Cambridge)
Organiser contact email address: information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host: Dr Bingbing Shi (University of Oxford)
Part of: Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary China
Booking required?: Not required
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Clare Orchard