Awards

• Long-listed for Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation 2025
• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2025

Overview

In Song-period China (960–1279 CE), masters in the Chan (Japanese Zen) school of Buddhism were presented as sources of religious authority on par with the Buddha, an almost unthinkably lofty status before the rise of Chan. This claim carried great rhetorical power, facilitating Chan's appeal to Buddhist monastics and powerful patrons alike. But it also raised a challenging question for Chan Buddhists, who insisted that buddhahood properly transcends all worldly marks: By what signs could one recognize a Chan master as a buddha? Discerning Buddhas argues that Chan Buddhists wove together tropes of sovereignty, hospitality, and martial heroism drawn from both Buddhist tradition and China's cultural heritage to develop a distinctive vision of what it meant for a Chan master to be a buddha in Song-period China. Kevin Buckelew analyzes the ways Chan Buddhists deployed such tropes in ritual, literature, and visual culture in order to stage the comparison of Chan mastery with buddhahood. He examines how they used the concept of buddhahood to work through questions about the ideal Chan master's authority, agency, and masculinity, in the process rendering buddhahood in terms highly legible to elite Chinese society. Chan Buddhists, Buckelew shows, developed their own ""signature"" of buddhahood, according to which enlightened Chan masters who truly deserved comparison to the Buddha were supposed to be distinguished from everyone else. By exploring the resulting Chan culture of discernment, which raised fundamental questions about Buddhist authority at a pivotal inflection point in Chinese history, this book offers fresh insight into the place of Buddhism in Chinese society.

Full Product Details

9780231212700

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Rebirth of Suspense offers a lucid and original contribution to the study of both suspense in general and how it operates in varieties of slow cinema. Rick Warner adds significantly to our understanding of different dimensions of suspense and hybrid effects in cinema that complicate oppositions between mainstream and arthouse approaches. -- Geoff King, author of <i>Arthouse Crime Scenes: Art Film, Genre and Crime in Contemporary World Cinema</i> Rick Warner offers a provocative rethinking of suspense that gives us a new way of seeing works of slow cinema—and the aesthetic of slowness more generally. His juxtaposition of suspense and slow cinema is both counterintuitive and elegant, opening a productive avenue of aesthetic exploration with originality and insight. Sophisticated but accessible, this is an exciting work of film scholarship. -- Jordan Schonig, author of <i>The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement</i> This beautifully written, richly nuanced book invites us to slow down: to feel the orchestration of suspense in its many forms. Through careful analyses of global art filmmakers (Chantal Akerman, David Lynch, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kelly Reichardt, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, to name a few), Warner makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary film theory and burgeoning studies of atmosphere and environment. -- Saige Walton, author of <i>Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement</i> In clear, eminently readable prose, Warner challenges the well-worn Hitchcockian model of suspense. His meticulous readings break down divisions between art-house and genre film, expanding our understanding of not only suspense and its affects but also the film medium itself. This book is a vital and long-overdue contribution to film theory. -- Catherine Wheatley, author of <i>Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema</i> Drawing in imaginative fashion on contemporary affective, phenomenological, and eco-theoretical concepts, Warner’s strikingly original study is a master class in applied theory. Grounded in exceptionally perceptive and compelling analyses of a wide variety of films and genres, this book is required reading for anyone interested in the operations of suspense (and much else besides) in cinema and beyond. -- Daniel Yacavone, coeditor of <i>The Oxford Handbook of Moving Image Atmospheres and Felt Environments</i> A richly researched and detailed study that contributes original perspectives on an aspect of cinema that is often underrepresented: the slow pacing of tension and suspense in film. * Film International * A groundbreaking, provocative investigation into the uses of suspense in 'slow cinema' ...Highly recommended. * Choice *

The Rebirth of Suspense offers a lucid and original contribution to the study of both suspense in general and how it operates in certain varieties of slow cinema. Warner adds significantly to understanding of different dimensions of suspense and hybrid effects in cinema that complicate oppositions between mainstream and arthouse approaches. -- Geoff King, author of <i>Arthouse Crime Scenes: Art Film, Genre and Crime in Contemporary World Cinema</i> Rick Warner offers a provocative rethinking of suspense that gives us a new way of seeing works of slow cinema—and the aesthetic of slowness more generally. His juxtaposition of suspense and slow cinema is both counterintuitive and elegant, opening a productive avenue of aesthetic exploration with originality and insight. Sophisticated but accessible, this is an exciting work of film scholarship. -- Jordan Schonig, author of <i>The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement</i>

Author Information

Rick Warner is associate professor and director of film studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks (2018).

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