| Summary: | In the early 1990s, Yingjin Zhang had already developed a deep fascination with the concept of flânerie, namely, a process of creating intersubjective aesthetic experience and modern knowledge through a form of spatial practice—walking in the city. The experience of the flâneur in a constant flow of urban images resembles the cinematic experience, which is also quintessentially modern. By treating the flâneur as a critical metaphor, Zhang has reconceptualized cinema as a distinct form of spatial practices that can be employed as a tactic of resistance, both for the individual to challenge the dominant collective and for the local to challenge the dominant global. In his meta-critical analyses of cinema and space, Zhang demonstrates that the ephemeral zones of individual, everyday, and local perceptions must be accounted for through a multidirectional, comparative approach in film studies.
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