Abstract of the chapter: This chapter establishes the theories on how human civilization is based on three ways of recording that divide human civilization into three different ages. The first age lasting from approximately 150,000 years ago to some 6,000 years ago featured verbal language to narrate and inherit the civilization in which the mankind created and developed languages and converted their lives, experiences and observations and descriptions of the world into words. The second age formed about 7,000 years ago when civilization was recorded and inherited through words that became the dominant force in human society at around 4,000 years ago and lasted until today. In the third age emerging since the late 1800s, the movies, TVs and image streams on the internet incubated from the art of photography quickly transformed the way people remember, record, observe and narrate lives, and significantly changed the traditional role of books and written languages in the human society. People are surrounded and changed by the visual images. The massive scale of “writing” with images began to change human memory, the world and life itself. The third way of recording with images opened up the very era we are undergoing today.
The philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) once said: “The universe is a novel.” In his age, novels provided the main approach for the mankind to talk about their lives, books were not abandoned by the human race, words dominated the world and the glory of rationality provided the beacon for human perspectives. To establish a civilized world, humans needed 30,000 years of relentless endeavors. When counting from the ages of ancient Chinese pottery, the process lasted for approximately 70,000 years.
The world civilization experienced dramatic changes after Santayana’s era. Movies, televisions, computers and internet entered most people’s lives. The aural images invented in movies have resulted in massive productive activities in the three realms- movies, TV and computer networks which through rapid expansion on TV and the internet have covered people’s living space and consumed our living time, and therefore replaced words to become a more important way for storytelling. Visual images have left people today and in the future a memory of life and history different from before, and given birth to a visual world for the whole mankind. It therefore justifies saying: “The universe is a movie”.
As such, the history of human civilization falls into three distinct ages: the age when civilization was recorded and inherited through verbal language, the age of written narration and inheritance, and the age of visualized account and lineage.
The Third Chronicle
Lasting from approximately 150,000 years ago to some 6,000 years ago, the first age saw the humankind create and develop languages, putting their lives, experiences, observations and descriptions of the world into words. People afforded names to everything in the world so that they can communicate and spread their inner experiences and ideas. In this age, people created the aural culture. Languages carried the bulk of human knowledge, wisdom and strength, and became the vehicle to narrate and inherit civilization. “The strength of languages is incredible,” said an African philosopher, “for they link us together.” In the language of the Ful Fuld people, the etymological meaning of “conversation” (Ha’ara) is “to give strength” (refer to chapter 7 & 8, volume 1 of General History of Africa edited by J. Ki-Zerbo). Verbal languages created the first memory beyond human genes, the first cultural memory that can be passed down through the generations. Before that, humans, like other animals, only had behavioral memory (including some simple sound memory) which will vanish with the passing of a generation. You cannot inherit your ancestors’ behavioral memory if you have never seen them after birth. Verbal languages however make it possible to pass the ancestors’ stories throughout the generations. We may gain a glimpse of the memorial traits of verbal linguistic civilization through the Africans who are the inheritors of such a civilization. A. Harmupat Ba once said: “One of the features of the memory of Africans is that the African memory is like a complete movie that can recover the entire event or story from the start to end, and re-present the scenes to make people feel like personally on the scene. It is not a matter of memory, but simply introducing the past event to the scene so that everybody- the narrator and audience can be engaged.” The human civilization is founded on the ability to recollect and account their lives and experiences, and from verbal language, we developed the first chronicle of human civilization.
Written languages began to emerge about 7,000 years ago. Developed from the drawings from 30,000 years ago, written languages represented phrases with accurate meanings that were repeatedly used and were able to construct abstract rational concepts and thinking. A rational civilization was thus born. The information produced by written languages can be easily replicated, kept for a long period and spread extensively. With the passage of time, the information was converted into people’s ideas which through writings resulted in religious decrees, philosophies, sciences, history and laws. The written languages therefore became a dominant force in human lives and societies.
About 4,000 years ago or during the Xia Period of Chinese history, official schools appeared and the ability to handle written information began to imply the identity and status of a person. The way we divide people’s education into elementary school, middle school, high school and PhD levels nowadays all owe to the linguistic labeling formed in that era. Our identities are categorized at the college stage wherein the PhD title suggests you have mastered the application skills with verbal symbols in a certain specialized field. In China’s middle Spring and Autumn Period about 2,000 to 600 years ago, writing activities became popular among the common people and productive linguistic activities prospered. The eyes replaced the ears as the main vehicle to process abstract information and as such, the mankind stepped into a visual civilization from aural civilization. The entire achievements and changes of human societies in today’s human civilizations are a result of the efforts to reproduce lives and social cultures in this period. The written languages therefore constituted the second chronicle of the human civilization.
Motion pictures were born in the end of the 19th century when John Logie Baird (1888-1946) transmitted via radio waves a human image from London to New York, the first time an instant long-distance image transmission was accomplished. The technology was later named facsimile. Baird played “moving images”, namely today’s television, to the public in London for the first time before Christmas in 1939. The United States launched the world’s first black and white television set in 1939 and color television in 1954. Movies and televisions penetrated every corner of the world in the following decades and became the new and most powerful way for people to record and narrate their lives and experiences. Myriad TV channels and movie theatres played moving images nonstop across the globe, becoming a tool for the humankind to tell their stories in a continuous manner. All of these owe to the “art of photography” that emerged in the late 1700s or early 1800s. Allegedly invented by astronomer John Herschel, the odd term- photography literally means “writing with light” in English. And we have to pay homage to the inventor of the word for his wisdom: the movies, TVs and image streams on the internet have quickly transformed the way people remember, record, observe and narrate lives, and significantly changed the traditional role of books and written languages in the human society. People are surrounded and changed by the visual images. The massive scale of “writing” with images is beginning to change human memory, the world and life itself. While it is still hard to tell if it is a blessing or a disaster, the human civilization has entered the third chronicle following the ages of verbal and written languages.
Semantic Origins of Images
The significance of cinema aesthetics to the art of cinema lies at its ability to tell people how to make a good movie. Scientifically however, this is just its secondary value. The main significance of cinema aesthetics to sciences is that it unveils the way images can produce semantemes. Given the fact that imaged narrations have become the principal tool to produce human civilization, the value of this significance is way superior to people’s traditional understanding of arts. People began to use drawings to tell stories since about 30,000 years ago until hundreds of years ago when people mastered the capability to convert drawings into images that are produced on a major scale and transmitted widely. The photographical “languages” have since begun to shatter the traditional structure of the world and the civilization system.
In his book - Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman (1931-2003) argued that: “Photography is a language that speaks only in particularities, and its vocabulary of images is limited to concrete representation. Unlike words, the photo does not present us an idea or concept of the world, except as we use language to convert the image to an idea.” Such a saying is actually incorrect. Images do encapsulate ideas and semantics, although the idea and semantics are different from the idea and concept formed by words. It is a very different way to describe and interpret things, and cannot be interpreted using the ideas established by words. We know from movies that the same object or character can have different semantics when the angle of the camera varies, as people’s understanding differs. The semantics of images fill up the blind spots of words. Thanks to the impossibility of inter-interpretability between them, images unveil the existence of a vast world beyond the words and show the limitations of the world described by words. Such limitations translate into the limitations of humans’ rational thinking, and both limitations were unknown to the mankind.
Images of a character can either draw admiration or hatred from the viewers. Though it is just an effect of the semantics transmitted of an image, people will apply their attitudes, feelings and understandings upon the real person. This is an emotional memory. Since we are still at the early age of image chronicling and people’s image-associated thinking is still in infancy, most people often establish incorrect association between emotional memory and understandings. In our civilization, every weakness of the mankind is exploited by businesses and politics for a gain. That is why we have movie and TV stars and an American society depicted under the pen of Postman:
“All public discourses are gradually appearing in the forms of amusement and become a cultural spirit. Our politics, religions, news, sports, education and commerce are all willing to become vassal to entertainment without any complaint or even without making a sound, as a result of which we have become a species that amuse ourselves to death.”
As I was writing this article, the president of America was once a Hollywood actor, while one of his main rivals was the most famous TV icon, an astronaut in the 1960s whose space expedition was made into a movie naturally.
Former American President Richard Nixon, who once claimed he lost an election because he was sabotaged by makeup men, has offered Edward Kennedy advice on how to make a serious run for the presidency: lose twenty pounds. Although the Constitution makes no mention of it, it would appear that fat people are now effectively excluded from running for high political office. Probably bald as well. Almost certainly those whose looks are not significantly enhanced by the cosmetician's art. Indeed, we may have reached the point where cosmetics have replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.[1]
It has become a basic fact that visual memories have encircled our living environment and penetrated our ideology. People born after the 1980s have received way more images than words. Visual recording is giving birth to an age of entertainment, reduced intelligence and images. When the middle schools in America teach history by showing America: The Story Of US (2011), when Yale University granted an honorary PhD degree to Meryl Streep in 1983 with thunderous applauses that were louder than those for Mother Teresa, and when several universities in China invited movie stars to be their “professors”, and when one even intended to invite a Japanese porn star to teach in the classroom in 2012, we knew that education and schools that are built to transmit information through languages are also being invaded and submersed by visual images.
Images with their own semantics are building their own memory and history.
Attentions to the generation process and semantic origin of images are no longer confined to the research on movies and TVs. Aesthetics are no longer cognition of sensible expressions of human civilization, but enhanced to the prophecy and interpretation of new human civilization. From aesthesis, it transformed into a narration of the dissolution of the civilization built on words, and carries a weak sound in an age when ignorance dominates over human intelligence. In his book Interaction of Media, Cognition, and Learning, the American media scholar Gavriel Salomon said: “Looking at an image, you only need to identify, but looking at words, you need to understand.” He made a point, but failed to notice that such a simple, low-level act of identification would become the origin of a new system of civilization. The units recorded in images are specific objects and their semantic coverage has substantial difference with the semantic implications of words. They cannot re-present the intangible, historic and abstract denotations summarized and agglomerated from languages and words over thousands of years. For instance, they cannot present “people”, but only “some persons”; and not “trees”, but only “a pine tree” or “an oak tree”. Nobody can present the image of the “entire nature” or the “entire sea”, apart from a cliff of certain shape at a certain time, certain place and under certain light, or a wave of certain angle in a certain moment. If we compile a “dictionary of images”, then such basic but extremely important expressions in our civilization as “ideas”, “truths”, “sciences”, “cultures”, “honors”, “love” and “fallacies” would all vanish. When Chinese philosopher Gongsun Longzi argued that “the white horse is not horse” some 2,000 years ago, he had already noticed the gigantic insurmountable gap between the visual and written languages and between the two civilizations.
However, that doesn’t suggest images cannot describe the world fairly. A seconds-long commercial without any language can depict and communicate a thing in a much better way than a pile of words or languages. Whereas images cannot express the concept of “universe” and words can explain the concept through a book, the images can nonetheless offer us a direct view of the entire universe through the movie Hubble. Compared with the written description of the universe, we will have to admit that the movie offers a larger amount of more real and detailed description that instills in us more knowledge than the words do, although words are needed in the movie for narration since words are still the main way for people in our era to understand and measure things. Also, movies like Microcosmos present us in a more articulate way than books the coexistence of different biological worlds on the face of the planet.
Images are creating their own language and narrations, and their competition with words may last for a thousand years or so. Their present flaws may not translate to their future flaws and their powerful advantages are already taking shape. We can not escape from this evolution of civilization, but intelligent degradation and alienation from books shall not be our only option.
The semantics of images have several different origins, the following three being the most rudimentary:
One is the original nature of images. An image is developed by people via a certain technical approach from something that truly exists in the realities, which were mostly translated into words before the invention of photography. The originals of images have a certain purpose that enters the images through the translation and becomes the most primitive semantic of the image. A photo of Hitler for instance represents the character Hitler that truly existed in history and the crimes he committed against the humankind. This is an image on the primitive level that can be processed to become an extended image with extended semantics. Hitler’s moustache for example has become the symbol of dictation, fascism and evils in many a video works (e.g. the Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin). German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) once claimed in his senior years that “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) to be the target of philosophies. A lifeworld is a real world full of conflicts and chaos as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life, as sharply distinguished from the objective “worlds” of the sciences. Through this world, people can achieve the “basics for the ultimate existence”. Images come from this real lifeworld which transmits its meanings directly into images, many of whose morphemes and semantics can not be encompassed or expressed by languages or words.
The second one is bestowed by the producers of images. In the process of turning the originals into images, the producers can not avoid instilling their own opinions, observations, understandings and emotions towards the originals into the images. For instance, the angle he shoots the image expresses his angle of observation and feelings towards the object. Also, he needs to connect the images together, which will construct a relationship among the images. While some relationships, such as those between the flowing snowflakes and wind, fish and water, stars and sky, are natural, others like patching of scenes are manmade. Different groupings of shots can produce different semantics and thus become another main origin of imagery semantics. As image production affords semantics to the images, the producer’s background determines to a major extent the semantics of the images.
The third one is the viewer’s background cultural foundation in the interpretation of the images. Over 90 years ago, a big close-up head shot would have scared people because they had never seen such a thing and would have believed it to be a chopped-off head moving. Today, nobody would be surprised by a close-up for they have been watching too many moving heads on the TV since childhood. This is the background cultural foundation playing a role in image interpretation. Different people have different understandings of the words in a book because their knowledge backgrounds differ when comprehending the words, and the same applies to the interpretation of images. The viewers’ knowledge backgrounds will change the semantics of the images to a certain degree.
Although images have been around for more than 100 years, we are still at the early age of using images to record time from the temporal perspective of human civilization. The human race has just started using photographic language, thinking and memory. Images are absorbing cultural elements and energies from the complex and ancient world background in which they were born, in order to generate their own phraseology and semantics, and create their own account of the human lives and experiences. Our memories of history are being gradually updated and such memories determine the way we see the world.
We can look back to find a pattern.
When the written languages tried to replace verbal languages, the first thing they had to do was to convert the knowledge, wisdom and memories inherited from verbal languages into written words. And that job lasted for thousands of years. The most important early works of words in existence were also created in this way; they include: The Book of Songs, The Epic of King Gesar, Manas, Veda, Ghatotkacha, Ramayana, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Upanishads, The Rhino Horn Scroll and The Bible. Socrates passed down his philosophy through verbal narrations which were recorded in written words during his life, whereas Confucius “only believed in speaking”. The Book of History- Yuxia Volume is probably one of the greatest works in the linguistic history of humankind. An on-site narration of the speeches and acts of government officials written by Chinese government historians more than 4,000 years ago, the book represents the separation of written language from verbal language and the course of independent civilization creation by the written words.
Today, photographic narrations are repeating this process. It may need thousands of years for them to convert the human experiences, wisdom, memories, knowledge and lives created by words over thousands of years into images. And those that can be successfully converted will encapsulate the history and semantics of images.
Background of Images
People rumored before the advent of movies that God was dead.
We still don’t know as of today who was the first person to announce the death of God. Generally, people believe the announcer to be Nietzsche (1844-1900) whose book Der Antichrist (1895) is translated as the Death of God in Chinese. A namesake movie was produced in the same year Nietzsche made the announcement. Though the two happenings were irrelevant, it showed the significant background of movie images. Just as matters settled from the immense space expansion of dark matter or non-matter and developed into the planets and the world we live in, images present a splendid expansive source that surmounts the material limits of the lens. The semantic world of movie images is born against this background and the ultimate interpretation of cinematic languages lies in the interpretation of its relationship with the background.
Verbal languages, written languages and images are all symbolic structures for the expression of semantics that are born in specific background and can be understood by people with sufficient background information. According to the exploration of the occurrences and developments of various cultures on earth in over 3 billion years in the book Remaking of Civilizations, the so-called culture can be defined as a symbiotic relationship among species and between species and their living environments. It determines and changes the species’ living conditions. Human civilization is the product of such a symbiotic relationship that repeatedly confirms and rebuilds the core relationship through people’s life activities, and in the process gives birth to words, languages, emotions, imaginations, knowledge, wisdom, sciences, laws, arts, wars, currencies, social structures and every act of life that can be perceived as cultural phenomena and has a purpose. These perceived cultural phenomena and behaviors of life became the backgrounds for the generation of semantics for verbal languages, written languages and images. We can illustrate the changes people have undergone in their knowledge and experience backgrounds since the birth of movies through a simple example.
Every image we see is generated from its own background. The aforementioned are just several clear domains amongst the extensive and chaotic backgrounds full of different noises and silences. In the activities in which humans generate image accounts, various elements and utterances will emerge from different realms and blend into different layers of images. The image elements of various layers interact to produce image semantics and internal structures. Though different from words, these structures can still describe the world, be communicated among people and develop into memories. When we refer to the word “Ultraman”, it indicates both the image and the emotions and semantic memories associated with it, and the memories are shared and exchanged among people with similar memories, even though only very few of them actually believe Ultraman can save the mankind and the earth.
Layers of Images
There are very few univocal images. The polysemy of image semantics gives images the possibilities for narrations, changes and developments in different directions, and the inclusion and expression of these possibilities become the metaphors and the directions of arts. The significance of the art of image mainly lies in its internal formation. It is generated from changes of details in its relationships with the external world and eventually shapes the complexity and polysemy of stories and the entire macro narrations of time and space.
Just as languages and words have different structures, so do images. Evolving from ancient drawings, the Chinese characters harbor various elements such as strokes, sides, radicals, pictograms and sounding icons which together feature the convergence between the historic etymology and real etymology, between historic soundings and real soundings and between historic semantics and real semantics, whereas the relationship between words and the world lies between disappearance and appearance. Every Chinese character tells history for it comes from and records an extensive background of time and space. Though expressed differently, the English language is no exception for its etyma, affix, letter affinity and soundings all tell the existence and changes of history and backgrounds. When we come across the English word “culture”, it might remotely remind us of land cultivation, and those who have lost such association may have also lost the historic consciousness about this word.
Images are similar as well. Every image carries several layers that can fall into two major categories: graphic & aural layer and semantic layer.
The graphic layer (sounds and audios are embedded in one or several graphic layers) is formed of both physical and cultural elements. A regular optic film contains more than 30 image layers, namely, physical layers of image. The mastery and application of these physical layers in culture allow them to be organized into image discourses with their own significances, taking our mastery and expression of hundreds of colors they have formed for example. With a lifetime committed to writing with light and images, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro once noted in a review that: “I have always tried my utmost to incarnate the director’s imaginations. In the time from my first film (Giovinezza, Giovinezza shot in 1969) to the Apocalypse Now which I call my first phase, my main concern was light. In the period from there to The Last Emperor I call my second phase, I entered the inside of light and also was studying colors. In my third phase after The Last Emperor, I explored how to present an image by balancing the various elements. ” [2] Entering the inside of light and using the balance of different elements to create images are artistic mastery of images on the physical layer at two different calibers.
Light, colors and sounds constitute the basic fabric of an image on the physical level.
Most cinematographers’ captures of images only touch the surface of light. To enter the inside of light, one shall be able to deal with the existence and expression of images on different layers such as energies of light, the strokes (in drawing or sculpturing, emotionally or semantically), the relationship between hue layers, the image relationship between lights, the discursive formation of light and the relationship between light, life and desire. Entering the inside of colors means the perception and application of the layer relationship of colors, color memory, color emotions and thousands of years of color vocabulary in the expression and invisible role in the real world through superficial color expression of color temperature and hue. To enter the inside of light, you need comprehension of western arts, but to enter the inside of colors, you need to go deep into the eastern arts. The image layers can not avoid contacting the semantic layers and through such contact develops the imaged accounts.
The semantic layer of images is more complex than the graphic layer. Either to an individual life or to a group, images tell the history, feelings, desires and thoughts. The background elements and activities we touched on earlier, and more of the detailed utterances in culture, nature and life all present different inter-crossing layers. Their expressions and mutual relationships develop into microcosmic semantic structures on different semantic layers which can also break into two major categories: emotional semantics and rational semantics.
The emotional semantics of images encompass the suggestions expressed in various facets we covered earlier such as their cinematic touch and artistic touch, and refer to people’s sensibilities, emotions, perceptions, desires, imaginations and memories that are orchestrated in the images. The rational semantics of images on the other hand refer to the thinking, discourse, science and rational knowledge and belief organized in the images. Rationality doesn’t equal philosophy. In fact, we can see the macro philosophy at the bottom of the rational semantics of images.
A cultural phenomenon that ended in our ages, philosophy encapsulates nearly 3,000 years of human wisdom. While the philosophy releases concepts, concepts dominate human lives (refer to Volume 1, The Finite Wisdom). When you choose a lifestyle, you choose a concept that will control your life. And that is your philosophy. On the layer of image semantics, all artistic problems are philosophical problems.
Movies representing a new culture and philosophy being an ancient and vanishing culture are looking at each other in the tides of time. In his book Creative Evolution (French: L'Évolution créatrice) published in 1897, French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: “In essence, the process entails extracting an abstract, pure non-personality movement, an average movement that is, from all movements accompanied with all objects, shoot with the camera and then through this indescribable movement and the combination of different specific circumstances, present the personality of very particular movement. That is the movie, the art of our consciousness.” It was the first discussion of movies in a professional philosophical work when movies were born only about two years earlier and constituted merely a street sideshow while philosophy had been on the throne of knowledge for over 2,500 years. The dialogue and conversation between the two have never ceased since then. And the biggest beneficiary from the contact and conversation between the two is the movies.
“God ordered me to undertake a mission for a philosopher to explore himself and others,” calmly said Socrates in the face of a death sentence. All philosophers and artists have been striving to accomplish the mission that has kept human rationality alive. While speculation on philosophy is an arduous journey, movies will eventually become a way to explore the world and human race through images. On the path already tracked by others, Luis Buñuel had long pondered over the decadence of mankind in the modern civilization; Michelangelo Antonioni was obsessed with the worries, confusion and loss of living values of people in modern life; though still alive, Jean-Luc Godard has long been drowned in the ocean of images and therefore wishes to become a free fish not confined by established rules of images; Shohei Imamura searched for the sexual philosophy of Japanese people; lacking any feminine genes in him, Akira Kurosawa crazed about the fate of mankind and the world from the perspective of male animals; and Alain Resnais seemed to be focused on what the most important thing in life is. There was once a conclusion made in the 1980s asking if people will love forever when “finding the one you love and staying with him/her forever”? Is that a desire or a kind of philosophy? The cinematic artists in the former Soviet Union once gathered together for finding a way to address their moral and life issues like scientists did research… Dazzled by all kinds of sciences and technologies in America, Steven Spielberg sought to surmount the altitude of Beverly Hills like other accomplished names in Hollywood did. On March 26, 2012, James Cameron made an epic move to scuba-dive to 10,898 meters deep in the Mariana Trench, proving that filmmakers can also produce images, besides owning a different life and philosophy: to explore life and the unknown world via another path.
Images need profound philosophies to transform into their own semantics in order to seek their own, ultimate secrete destination: to transform themselves into real human race and world. In an instantly changing era, the philosophies that arts have to face have never been the textbook philosophies, but rather the philosophies that humans don’t have sufficient knowledge of and can’t answer. Arts depend on people’s life instincts and intuitive abilities, thoughts, emotions, imaginations, courage and all creativity to approach these philosophies by creating a new way of narration to unveil their existence. 2,000 years ago, a youngster remarked to a gray-haired Archimedes: “Sir, since you have so much knowledge, you must know everything.” Archimedes drew two circles in the sands, one big and one small, and pointed to the small one, saying: “this is you”, and pointed to the bigger one, saying: “this is me”. Then he pointed to the space outside the circles, saying: “the more we know, the more we also don’t know.” When arts approach philosophies, they then enter a bigger circle, and move closer and closer to that mystical unknown world, gaining an openness and extensity of richer significances.
Inspired to ultimately change the unknown of the world in the reality, artists are bringing long-term impacts onto human lives. Life is created, and to create life, people need philosophies, for philosophies provide the persistent cure for life, govern the changes of objects and human behaviors in images, and afford meanings to humans and the world. The mission of images is therefore to constantly return to and reach philosophies. Ludwig Feuerbach once announced: “The world is only open to the open minds,” [3]whereas Albert Einstein advised:
“理性和哲学虽然看来不大可能在不久的将来会成为人们的向导,但它们一如既往,将是出类拔萃的少数人最珍爱的安身立命之所。”
“Although rationality and philosophy may not become the dominant force for people in the near future, they will, as always, provide the most precious shelter for those few elites.”
The article is an excerpt from Chapter 9, Section 1 of Zhu Xiaofeng’s Film Aesthetics, published at Shanghai Art and Literature Publishing House, 2012 Version, P387-418.
[1] 2004 Version,娱乐至死[Amusing Ourselves to Death]by Neil Postman, Guilin, Guangxi Normal University Press.
[2] 1996,用光写作——维托里奥•斯托拉罗访问记[Writing with Light- An Interview with Vittorio Storaro, World Cinema], Version 1, originally published in US journal- Film Quarterly.
[3] Ludwig Feuerbach ,未来哲学原理[Principles of Philosophy of the Future], Section 51.