This is the final draft. For citations, please refer to the published version of the essay in The Chinese Cinema Book (2020) Lim, Song Hwee, and Julian Ward, eds. The Chinese cinema book. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020: Chapter 23, pp. 258-268 1 Alternative Ways of Seeing: Post-Digital Detours in Chinese Cinema Paola Voci ‘on the one hand, there is the impression of reality; on the other, the perception of reality’ (Christian Metz) Over two decades, since the beginning of the digital turn, both practitioners and scholars are re-assessing its impact on cinema’s authorship, ownership and viewership. On the one hand, in China, as elsewhere, digital technologies have entered, transformed and expanded film’s institutions – such as film studios, film theatres, and film festivals – contributing to an experience of the moving image that is understood as dislocated and relocated away from film’s ‘motherland’. 1 On the other hand, more affordable DV technologies have also contributed to the expansion and diversification of film practices – an undeniably positive development, especially in a country like China, in which creative industries are openly and heavily controlled by the State. In particular, the digital turn has been a key factor in the rise of one-person video (yigerende yingxiang) and amateur cinema (yeyu dianying), the growth of independent documentary practices, 2 and the new cinematic realism of the ‘urban generation’. 3 As digital technologies have become the normative media for all cinematic practices, Chinese cinema has also begun to explore alternative ways of seeing that directly question the changed relationship between the photographic image and the world and more broadly address the implications of a ‘machinic vision’ 4 in the practice and experience of cinema. Characterised by a post-digital approach that understands ‘the form and use of digital cinema as a product of historical contingency rather than technological inevitability ’, 5 these