Primitive Passions: reading a little deeper!
Alot of the time when im reading (especially reading anything somewhat academic), ill come across a refrence or citation which precede's an authors argument, and it always leads me to wonder: should i have known this already? should i pause the book so that i can read/watch whatever it is they are talking about? This seems especially troublesome since books can and often will have hundreds of citations to things.. I find myself charging through most of the time, unaware just how much the argument afterwards will lean on this mysterious source text. It seems doubly impossible as what gets cited indoubtably will cite more things, sending you into an infinite trail of citations going forever and ever, all the way back to antiquity.
sometimes i do check out the citation, I watched deconstructing harry after Hito Steyerl mentioned it offhandly (which I was dissapointed by!), but most of the time ill just let it pass, and forget about it after a while.
In defense of the poor image - Journal #10. (n.d.).so lets read things a little deeper! ive decided to read Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema by Rey Chow, which I picked up at my universities used book store. Its a relatively short (at 252 pages) film studies book, and more importantly ive been intending on watching chinese films but never got arround to doing so. ill read the book chronologically, noting down any refrences as they go along, and ill try to read the majority of an argument before viewing the refrence, and then seeing how that recontextualizes things. I wont be reading anything cited within those cited sources (unless i feel like it) to try not to fall down any rabbit holes. It seems like a nice way to get a pretty broad swathe of materials to read.
Preface
The preface lays out the structure of the book, as well as giving thanks to grants and friends along the way etc.. most notably it refrences two films the author wrote about before this book: Yellow Earth and The King of Children, both by Chen Kaige -
King of the Children i had seen while i was thinking of commiting myself to this task, and I found it