Book Talk: East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era: Film Authorship Rethought
This book makes a critical intervention in the scholarship of East Asian cinema by examining how the platform-driven cinephilic engagement evokes a new imaginary of auteurs. While East Asian filmmakers continue to provide world screens with vibrant and innovative works in recent years, their names and visions have been intensely scrutinised and renegotiated by global cinephiles on digital media platforms such as Facebook, Letterboxd, MUBI, X, and Bilibili. The novel cinephilic experiences potentially problematises the authorial intent and structure legitimised by the traditional cinema, thus, challenging what film authorship means.
The monograph employs a dual structuring of auteurism and digital cinephilia to contend how East Asian auteurs’ brands are recoded, re-mobilised, and reassessed by platform users. As the first book-length account in the area, this volume calls for conceptual rethought of the auteur function in East Asia at the crossroads of film studies, audience/cinephilia studies, and new media studies.
Join us for a conversation with the author Associate Professor Dorothy Lau.
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Dorothy Wai Sim Lau is an Associate Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include stardom, celebrity, fandom, Asian cinema, Chinese cinema, platform culture, and screen culture. She is the author of Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (2019), Reorienting Chinese Stars in Global Polyphonic Networks: Voice, Ethnicity, Power (2021), Celebrity Activism and Philanthropy in Asia: Toward A Cosmopolitical Imaginary (2024), and East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era: Film Authorship Rethought (2025). Lau is the visiting scholar to the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield in 2022.