Thinking Cinema through Urban Parks

I am a PhD student and film researcher at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. On this site you will find my CV and social links. 

Originally from Shenzhen, I have studied Film Studies and Film Programming/Curation in New York and London. My current PhD research is titled 'Thinking Cinema through Urban Parks: Towards a Place Intervention in Film Theory' and situated at the intersection of Film Studies and Place Studies.

Research rationale: The study and theorisation of place have expanded knowledge in Film Studies since the late 20th century, especially regarding the relationship between cinema and the city. However, most of such interdisciplinary studies are concerned with aesthetic and cultural aspects without fully tapping into philosophical and theoretical potentials of the concept of place. To investigate how place can directly shape the way we think about cinema as a medium, I will examine the urban park in films as a representative cinematic place that manifests cinema’s theoretical paradoxes: the low and the high, the part and the whole, reality and illusion, thought and feeling, leisure and work, stasis and movement, the particular and the universal, temporal rationalisation and contingency. I will start from these paradoxical and dialectical relations to formulate an approach to think about film ontology through urban parks and place in general.