The question of why I named this project “The Chinese Cinema” and not something else has come up more than once since I adopted the name in 2017. The objection is that it flattens out the very real cultural, cinematic and political distinctions between the People’s Republic of China,

Four years ago, in the spring of 2013, I caught a particularly vicious strain of cinephilia. I’d been a guest on the They Shot Pictures podcast a couple of times, talking about Josef von Sternberg, Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse, and we decided to sneak in an episode on