By Pao-chen Tang. Amsterdam University Press, 2025 (Open Access).

The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema proposes a new mode of filmmaking in contemporary East Asian cinema: the titular “animist imagination.” At a time when a changing understanding of personhood has increasingly granted nonhuman entities legal protections and status, the mode has emerged to imagine ecological co-flourishing between human characters and nonhuman entities.

At the core of the book are films by several directors at the forefront of East Asian cinema, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kore-eda Hirozaku, Wong Kar-wai, Kawase Naomi. In contrast to an extractive relation to matter and resources, their animist imagination responds to the collective quest of environmentalists for alternative ways of understanding personhood and the world as a relational mesh. But their films do not leave the human behind. Instead, they reimagine certain human figures as what I call “shamanic figures,” who are uniquely equipped to teach viewers an ecological awareness through thought experiments positing an anti-anthropocentric relationality. Like the shaman who serves as a mediator between the human and the spiritual realms in premodern, pre-colonial Indigenous societies, the films examined in the book stage various shamanic figures to negotiate the human and the nonhuman realms through aspects of their respective identities and associated modes of living.

My contention is that these individual identities are shaped by larger historical conditions, such as the challenges imposed on East Asian cultural traditions by Western views of science and technology, globalized capitalist instrumentality, and the settler character of modern state formation. The shamanic figures might no longer be social leaders as shamans used to be in Indigenous communities, but they continue to perform magic in corners least anticipated: the survival of animism in modernity. The films thus arrange their form, content, and desired spectatorship around these figures’ perceptual, corporeal, and kinetic capacities, set in given cultural-historical frameworks.

Pao-chen Tang is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He has written extensively on questions of the nonhuman in reciprocity with cinema (as well as other forms of the moving image).