Imagining Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy): two landscapes of the Anthropocene, 1970 and 2014

ABSTRACT The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthropological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo’s adventure novel of the People’s Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution’s imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries.


Taking Tiger Mountain 2014
Tsui Hark's 2014 film The Taking of Tiger Mountain opens with Jimmy, a young Chinese programmer, taking leave of his friends in New York. The karaoke machine at the party unexplainedly interrupts the flow of pop with a scene from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, one of the eight model Peking operas of the Maoist era, in the film version directed by Xie Tieli in 1970. This frame story follows Jimmy travelling back to his home in Harbin through the landscapes of the Tiger Mountain story, originally a novel by Qu Bo called Tracks in the Snowy Forest about a fearless band of People's Liberation Army (PLA) fighters. I would like to hold the framing of the 2014 film as a critical point, not only because it links these films, through a rococo involution of permutations, to an orientalist American imagination, or because it imbricates and isolates the Chinese community in the imagined community of the USA, but because it links the real Tiger Mountain close to the present North Korean border to the Tiger Mountain imagined by the film's investors, distributors and some at least of its audience. As an auteurist note: Tsui Hark, born in Vietnam and raised in Hong Kong, studied at the University of Texas at Austin and got his first film work on Christine Choy's lauded 1976 documentary From Spikes to Spindles about New York's Chinatown. It is worth adding that in 1986, he released an action comedy set in 1913 in the world of Chinese opera, Peking Opera Blues, to considerable success.
The Taking of Tiger Mountain was, in the year of release, the tenth highestgrossing film in Chinese box office history. The film ends with a reprise of the 1970 film, this time in a strange palimpsest, where Jimmy finds himself eating with the PLA soldiers from the film-within-his-film, while a scene from Xie Tieli's film plays on a TV, before the credits, which include archive photographs of the actual soldiers that Qu Bo's story and the two movies are based on. It is hard not to understand that the entirety of Tsui Hark's film is an imagining of real events, mediated by the Peking opera, through a contemporary cosmopolitan blockbuster strategy assembling Hong Kong and Hollywood to remediate a Beijing Opera of the Cultural Revolution, and that the Tiger Mountain we see is perceived, in a diasporic imagination, from New York City.
Mediating these positions is an actual forest, presented several times from aerial views, an evergreen taiga along the North Korean border where the original events occurred and the real Tiger Mountain sits. Script mentions of nearby Harbin, location shooting of various skiing and action sequences, and the village set built on location anchor the film in its histories. But it is equally clear that many of the mountain shots are computer-generated, not least the iconic Eagle's Beak, which plays both narrative and symbolic roles (the route into the mountain fortress of the evil bandits, and an emblem of the regal ambition of their leader Lord Hawk, whose remarkable prosthetic nose is mirrored by the CGI peak). The film was shot and initially released in 3D with Dolby Atmos sound. It was clearly expected to do major box office business, and equally clearly intended to fit with then-current government priorities in the Peoples' Republic.
The embedded story closes at the beginning of the final act and gives way to Jimmy arriving at his grandmother's flat in Harbin. She sits him down at a table laid for many. The troops we recognise from the main story arrive, among them little Knotti, the boy they rescued and reunited with his mother. When Knotti speaks, he has the voice of an old man. He is Jimmy's grandfather. As they tuck in to the banquet, Jimmy's voiceover says: 'When I was little, Grandpa told me Tiger Mountain had a hidden airstrip. If I'm to imagine Yang saving grandma, it might have been like that . . . ' There follows a spectacular stunt and CGI sequence involving a biplane hurtling down a tunnel, eventually plummeting to destruction at the foot of a vast crevasse. At its conclusion we return to the banquet, where once more, on the wallmounted TV set, there is a reprise of a scene with Yang from the 1970 film. The assembled PLA troops turn to the screen, which now fills ours until the end of the dialogue, when the theme music of the modern film cuts in, titles roll, and an archive shot of the historical Yang Zirong fills half the screen.
Multiple imaginaries are involved here: actual events, Qu Bo's memoir, Peking opera movie, Jimmy's imagination, and the two versions he gives for the conclusion of that imagined narrative embroidered on the two preceding versions. Nathan To points out that '[t]he inclusion of Jimmy permits the audience to know that they are, in fact, watching something "staged", not unlike the experience of live theatre or opera' (Nathan 2015) and goes on to note a series of quotations from Cultural Revolution media tropes including stylised make-up and compositions derived from revolutionary posters and theatrics. A number of the critics cited on Rotten Tomatoes are also swift to point out the proximity of Tsui Hark's movie to the official ideology of the Communist Party of China, and indeed to the propagandistic intent of the model operas of the late 1960s and 1970s. In their essay on the economic circumstances of Taking's production, Yeh and Chao note significant changes to the prescribed elements of model operas. Villains in particular are given strong character traits excluded by the rules of model operas, and the underworld gang has its own 'twisted charm' (Yeh and Chao 2018, 197); while the stylised theatricality of the 1970 film gives way to a more familiar cinematic realism, alongside a somewhat camp remix of Hong Kong wuxia styles of the twentieth century with Hollywood action movie tropes and a host of effects shots clearly geared towards maximising returns on the investment in 3D technology.
Like any soldiers fighting for a cause, but even more so in the ideology of the PLA and more so again in the PLA re-imagined at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the goal is always future. There are negative goals -overcoming feudalism and warlordism -and positive goals, a crucial one given dynamic presence in the final scene of the PLA as family. In the retrospective aesthetic of The Taking of Tiger Mountain, Knotti is the son of the Red detachment, who becomes their grandfather at the family banquet, where his own grandson becomes an honorary son of the detachment in his turn. This banquet is not only a mark of revolutionary continuity, in line with Party ideology, but itself the realisation of the utopia that the PLA strove for. This is the future of that past. This is perhaps why Jimmy must re-imagine the concluding rescue, because otherwise there is no longer a function for revolutionary imagining when the goals of revolution have already been gained. Here the Communist Party of China faces an anomaly close to that described in one of Erich Fromm's ([1937] 2020) essays of the 1930s in which he suggests that by arguing that Christ's messianic coming is not in the future of the oppressed but in their past, and that therefore they must put up with their oppression, the ruling class take-over of Christianity eradicated its radical potential. This may be a plaint that would stymie the work of the film if Jimmy were not granted the ability to re-imagine the past otherwise. The malleability of history makes possible the malleability of the present. The translation of a real mountain into two kinds of cinematic spectacle tells us that the precise mechanism for this historical and ultimately ecological malleability, as I hope to show, depends on a term that has largely slipped out of the critical vocabulary (with the exceptions of Fabiani 2009;Sallis 2000): imagination.

Imaginary
Mountains are invisible. You can only ever see parts, some surfaces disposed towards you, not the further slopes, often not the depths of clefts and gullies, never the internal rock. And if you enter a mountain cave, the rest of the mountain disappears. This does not mean that mountains do not exist. On the contrary, their reality is constantly with us but mediated: the weather they create, the flows of water, the tumbling rocks, fluctuations in compasses and wealth dug from their interiors. It is rather that, for want of being able to see a mountain as a whole, we must imagine it. While mountain folk have their own cultures, all of us experience mountains as real and as strictly invisible. This is no doubt why they have been so often addressed as gods: because they are both real and imaginary. The word Anthropocene that also appears in my title is, similarly, both real and imaginary: We cannot experience a global shift in person, only in the imagination. Taking Tiger Mountain and its predecessor, separated by almost half a century, the fifty years during which environmental issues escaped laboratories and entered politics, the period when the term Anthropocene was coined and became a matter, perhaps the matter of concern for a generation, may also be a period when the word imagination subtly but significantly altered in its work in cultures and societies. Before returning to the films, we need to pause over this problem of presenting, the way imagining mountains in film reverses the polarity: The appearance is all that is real. Ansel Adams' (1995) print Moon and Half Dome in its way 'takes the place of a mountain', a phrase I take from the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens (1955, 512). Here it is, not 'word for word' as Stevens has it but broadly photon for photon, a similar if more explicit translation, through the media of light-sensitive molecules, digital scanning and photolithography, from the sunlight of that day in 1960 to the page as it appears today (Cubitt, Palmer, and Walkling 2015). Even readers familiar with Adams' zone system (Adams 1995) and his faith in the Image as a preconceived vision that it is the artist's technical task to realise, do not doubt that the mountain stood just so over there, that Adams stood over here, and that the photograph is a genuine record of their encounter.
To start an excavation of the 'mountain imaginary' it is only necessary to point out that, in Adams' print, what we can see is only one face of Half Dome, that legendary peak in Yosemite. Perhaps that is the role of the Moon in Adams' photograph: to recall that, until the age of satellites, the Moon kept hidden its further face, and that we only guessed or believed or demonstrated by indirect observation that the Moon was indeed a sphere rather than a flat disc about the size of a Euro coin, or indeed made of green cheese. The moon, too, exerts its tidal pull on mountains, and in this non-human but active way also 'observes' the mountain, from an angle that gives it a view on the side obscured to Adams (and to us). We infer that moonlight and reflected sunlight illuminate the hidden face of Half Dome, whose three dimensionality is assured by its configuration in the solar system's geometry of light. What we see lets us know that, where human senses and technologies fail, there is still a world. As we will see, computer-generated imaging (CGI) does something very similar for Tsui Hark's mountains, while Xie Tieli's film is concerned to produce another imagined and invisible whole: the people, to whom the opera is addressed.
In his first published book, Sartre (2004), one of the few major twentiethcentury philosophers to engage with the problem of imagination, observes that when we look at a chair, we see only one aspect, but we do not therefore doubt that the rest of the chair accompanies the part we can see. This is what he calls the imaginaire. His usage still echoes today in the much-quoted term 'imaginary community' that Benedict Anderson (1983) uses to describe the nation. The nation is imagined because its citizens will never know each other, never meet up, as they might meet their extended family or the folks in their village. They infer the existence of all those millions of others, imagine them, with such force that they will die, or kill, to preserve their community. Conjured up out of a limited cache of empirical evidence, the nation becomes heartbreakingly real. It is this same faculty that makes us so certain that behind the radical face of Half Dome there is indeed half a dome, and not the immense scaffolding of a stage set. In a complementary operation between staged performance and cinema presentation, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy takes the theatrical auditorium of the live event and transcribes it into the real space of the audience, in city film palaces or rural tents so that, dispersed as they are, they can be imagined as both the folks directly addressed in the operatic theatre in Beijing and, just as that audience was, as participants in and figures of the invisible-real of the Chinese People. There is no need to make convincing depictions of mountains in the 1970 film because what is being imagined is China.
We face Adams' image as an imagining of Half Dome because it can only capture as its raw material the light from this one angle. What we see is a translation of what presented itself in that specific encounter: what appeared. Most philosophical traditions, East and West, distinguish Being from Appearance. Ecology has begun to teach us that appearances do not deceive. Admittedly both the Ecology and even an ecology, such as the ecology of Yosemite or of Half Dome, are what Morton (2013) calls 'hyperobjects': concepts simplifying a mass of appearances, histories and measurements into a single concept. This photograph, and perhaps any photograph, by its combination of precision and inference, approaches the abstraction of a concept. It is perhaps not too much to say that this photograph lives up to Ansel Adams' principle of the Image, not representing the mountain but presenting its concept, replacing the actuality with an idea. On this evidence, it is logical to make the extrapolation that any mountain is also an abstraction, since we can never see or apprehend it in its totality through the senses, but nonetheless extrapolate the inference that there is indeed a mountain. Imagining and abstracting have something in common, then, something akin to the familiar geological section that first appeared in the frontispiece to Lyell's Principles of Geology of 1847. Lyell's contemporary and friend Charles Darwin could point to visible evidence. Lyell had a more difficult task in giving his propositions graphic form. The Earth's crust, he notes, comprises not merely all of which the structure is laid open in mountain precipices, or in cliffs overhanging a river or the sea, or whatever the miner may reveal in artificial excavations; but the whole of that outer covering of the planet on which we are enabled to reason by observation made at or near the surface. (Lyell 1838, 3) The title of Lyell's frontispiece, 'IDEAL SECTION of part of the Earth's crust', tells us that what he felt impelled to undertake was not direct observation but reasoned extrapolation from available sources. Drawn four years before Scottish glaciologist James David Forbes introduced the West to the seismometer (they had been used in China since the second century; Needham 1959, 625-35), Lyell's Ideal Section had no access to underground forms or forces. Twenty-first century seismographs have moved on from the drum-plotter type familiar from movies, though like them the secret is to fix the pen to an inert mass and let tremors move the writing surface. Today's models suspend up to three masses at angles to one another in electromagnetic fields, allowing movement in three dimensions, recording the amount of electrical force needed to keep the mass inert and converting voltage into either numerical tables or diagrams for display (Nebeker 1995). Amplifying the record, seismometrists can deduce magnitude (Richter scale), intensity (Mercalli scale), compass bearing and depth. Real-time change thus becomes visible, but only through a complex set of indirect and mediated observations, amplifications and translations. Interpreting the read-outs still requires a leap of imagination.
Mountains are then imaginary as well as real. I recall being transfixed as a boy by the phrase 'the roots of the mountains' even though I never read William Morris's late nineteenth century romance of that name. I grew up on the Lincoln Wold, low hills rising among the boggy Fens of the low-lying east of England. I only saw mountains for the first time aged perhaps eight years old on a family holiday to Scotland. The idea haunted me that these great slopes had roots, like the trees we would see torn from the ground after the big storms that blew in off the North Sea. They suggested there was ancient growth there. Trees were our favourite playground in my windswept home, especially in storms, when the branches we clung to swayed, part of the wind themselves. The wind and the invisible roots made mountains even more like our trees: limes, sycamores, walnuts, apple trees and chestnuts with clefts deep enough to hide a child. When I came to understand that mountains grew by tectonic and volcanic forces, and that they were battered into shape by howling winds, water and ice, it came as no surprise; and equally natural when I learned from Maori friends that they were living things, with names, stories, and secrets. Ansel Adams' Half Dome photograph seems to have a penumbra of that animist feel.
Five hundred years ago or so, Shakespeare's Theseus, king of Athens, described how imagination ' . . . bodies forth / The forms of things unknown' (Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i). Shakespeare plays a finely ironic hand. We in the audience have seen his fairies with our own eyes and he, the poet, is the one who has enchanted us, so while we might agree with Theseus' pathology, we also cling to the illusion. This simultaneity of belief and disbelief comes close to one of Freud's (1919) most profound findings: that in fantasy, all mutually contradictory positions are simultaneously the case. The Romantic poet Coleridge ([1817] 1965, Chapter XIV) spoke of the phenomenon as 'the willing suspension of disbelief', an ephemeral permission where scepticism and faith balance for the duration of an aesthetic experience. This formal relationship between ephemeral and permanent remains an abiding penumbra of mountains, actual, photographed, surveyed or narrated.
The modern imagination is productive. Like contemporary seismographs, Adams' prints of Half Dome do not remove the mountain from the world but orient his and his viewers' gaze around the place of the mountain, organising that place in its multiple appearances that gather views around them without needing to sacrifice the mountain's otherwise unseen existence. The art that takes place makes place: It is an action. Inspired by the hereness of the mountain, Half Dome and seismographic displays of current quakes and glacial displacements retroactively produce thereness in an action similar to the activity of financial trading as described by Arjun Appadurai as rituals, which in that case 'are in fact constitutive or, better still, generative of the force of all social conventions' (Appadurai 2016, 90). This ability of actions to create the conditions for their own activity that Appadurai calls 'retroperformativity' after Butler (1997) is characteristic of imagination which, in an operation that can best be described as subjunctive, imagines and thus creates the grounds for what might or could or even should be the case.
That form of imagination anchored in hereness and appearance, often tied to ephemerality and so to the present moment, destabilises the givenness of the present as presence. It doubles the now and the here with the shadow of another now, another here, a different 'place'. This strange temporality, itself an enduring feature of mountains and mountain cultures, their myths, their moments of high spirituality, coexists with the very different quality of mountains that attracted me as a child to the idea of their roots: their permanence. This permanence is, in the imagination, the combined force of the mountain that at once is and is not.

Anthropocene
This is not the only temporality of imagination. All of us, I imagine, have at one time or another imagined what things would have been like if we had done something differently in the past. And all of us, I suppose, have imagined futures for ourselves, our loved ones, our communities and our planet. The capacity to imagine alternative pasts and futures belongs with the possibility that something other might emerge from the tyranny of the present, another future, of course, but also another past. The Anthropocene future however has another function: to imagine The End. This imaginary becomes only more complex if, as among so many green activists, the Anthropocene apocalypse, like the colonial, has already occurred (Dillon 2012, 8). The puzzle of an imagined past is not so difficult when we consider mythic tales from Homer to the kind of fascist nostalgia that powers too many neo-populist movements in Europe and beyond, integral parts of the imagining of national community. Those pasts become battlegrounds as we argue over the histories of human migration. The puzzle of an imagined future is worst when, contra Bloch (1988), it includes mortality: not just mine but the species' and the planet's. For the films we are investigating, the Revolution is ahead (for its protagonists), current (in the case of the Cultural revolution era film) and already over (for Jimmy and his New York friends). They and we are invited to rediscover the connection between these eras as a way of doing something more than survive, more than becoming living archives of what there was before the apocalypse, whether that is contemporary consumerism or its adjunct Anthropocene. The imagining of mountains in these two films may help decipher what the Anthropocene has done to imagination as a human, or perhaps more-thanhuman, subjunctive quality of the world.
Tsui Hark uses locations, location sets, studio sets and computer-generated mountains. Xie Tieli relies on the painted backdrops of the theatrical production and on then newly-imported Technicolor technology (Dootson and Zhu 2020). Reference to the real, or an indexical relation to real mountains, is less significant in both films than their ability to evoke or, very specifically, to encourage the audience, figured as the audience in the auditorium in the earlier film and on screen in Tsui Hark's film by the character Jimmy, to imagine a mountain. In the 2014 film, the mountain seen in vista is a wireframe; even its bowels are composited from wireframes, notably in the biplane tunnel sequence. These armatures are fleshed out with texture maps, and finally wrapped by surfaces typically derived from texture libraries before being composited with live action, sweetened with custom detailing, and passed to digital intermediary for colour balancing and continuity. Two companies, Dexter and Mofac, both based in Seoul, worked on this production, otherwise a Hong Kong/mainland coproduction. The logistics of the supply chain between sub-contracting specialist effects houses, often working on elements of the same shot, requires digital workflow management that is as seamless as the diegetic world on screen (Curtin and Vanderhoef 2015).
Such details of the production process, intrinsically fascinating for movie buffs, and economically important in the bitterly competitive effects market, also raise a significant issue for critical enquiry into the question of imagination. The Romantic imagination was explicitly a property of individuals. Whether gift or cultivated, and even when declined and denied by the enemies of imagination, from Shakespeare's Theseus to Dickens' Gradgrind, imagination was and remains, as infantile or pathological trait, an essentially inward and personal capacity. But in the development of contemporary effects movies, not only fantastic beasts, but even verisimilitudinous entities like mountains have to be collectively imagined. No less than realism, imagination requires a social production, just as, seen as retro-performativity, it in turn produces the social.
Here the exactness of the execution facilitates the exactness not of the individual subject, but the subject who knows collaboratively, the subject no longer of the Romantic imagination, but a collective subject. This collective itself oscillates between two poles. At one extreme lies the collective knowledge of Science, the surveying subject of cartography and data visualisation, the collective subject addressed by Lyell's diagram of the unseen yet known subterranean structure of a model volcano. In Lyell's day, and especially for Lyell, who understood, along with Darwin, the enormous challenge his science laid against Christian beliefs of the age, the burden of individuality was still apparent. But modern seismology is no longer the adventure of lone boffins. It is a logistical operation of major agencies like the US Geological Service and the Global Seismographic Network, operated through the 150 stations of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) (Gee and Leith 2011). Producing, analysing and interpreting data are large-scale operations involving human functionaries with the planet, technologies, standards, protocols, their governance and communications networks that ensure synchronisation as well as sharing results. The logistical chains producing visual effects movies are of a kind with the more-than-human, cyborg operation of collectively managed science.
The second pole of the collective subject forms as an affective union around a utopian goal: the collective figured here by the PLA soldiers and their ancestral role in the present. The work of imagination of this second collectivity shifts from the instrumental goals of providing warnings, monitoring nuclear tests and aiding corporate searches for mineral wealth, but equally away from the scientific aesthetic of pure contemplation, towards a purposeful but non-teleological openness and emotional connection to the world and one another: or more immediately the goal of telling a story and gaining recognition for its message. The subjectivity produced in these new collectives is in perpetual movement between scientific rationalism and emotional bonds, between the mountain imagined and the mountain engineered as special effect.
The proof of this lies in the managerial prospect that colours and constrains the collaborative imagining of the production process. Even imaginary mountains cannot be perceived in a single glance, even from an imaginarily perfect place. This is the point of the word 'strategy' in the title of the older film, and in the narrative of the 2014 movie. The strategic imagination conceives of a conjuncture from many standpoints. The strategist requires the virtue of imagination to connect the disparate fragmentary reports of senses, scouts and instruments (in the film binoculars and maps both serve as partial scientific knowledge supplementing what the soldiers and their captain can see with their own eyes). Adrian Ivakhiv (2013) makes a neat distinction between cinematic geomorphologies that work to produce territorial objects and anthropomorphologies that produce territories of action. These are elementary modes of a strategic imagination that sees, for example, in the threatening overhang of the Eagle's Beak the possibility of a tactically propitious avalanche. For such an imagination, attuned to action, the greater the fidelity to detail, the more obscure the necessary outlines become. The strategist must recompose the pines and shift the rocks. But in the case of Tsui Hark's protagonists, the test of imagining a mountain is whether it can be weaponised, as in the climactic battle, when the PLA seize a bandit tank and aim for the cliff face above their fortress.
Imagination has become collaborative and, in the twenty-first century, the mode of collaboration tends towards the strategic, performative imperative: to imagine in order to make things work for the fulfilment of a task. The solipsism of the Romantic imagination was always an exaggeration. It was typically expressed in language which, even if recomposed poetically, is always a collective production. We have just seen that imagination is not exclusively human. It takes humans, more than one, to imagine a mountain, but it also takes a mountain. At the same time, as a remake, The Taking of Tiger Mountain not only depicts a job of work, a strategy, but is itself involved in a strategic remaking of an older ideology. As Nathan To observes, this involves an evocation, through the frame story of Jimmy, the diasporan Chinese returning to the 'noble virtues of sacrifice, filial piety, courage, power, and the sentimental articulation of recovering one's ancestral roots and heritage' (Nathan 2015). But there is also recalled and remade something of the Maoist ideology, particularly of the Cultural Revolution period. Blessed, or cursed, as we are now with knowledge of the devastating consequences of the Cultural Revolution, it is all but impossible to read this film's reframing of collectivism as anything but cynically propagandistic, or perhaps a soft-power play on susceptible audiences. But let us not forget the immense attraction of the ideals of the Cultural Revolution at the time, most particularly the utopian dimension of a collective imaginary. I must leave for Sinologists the challenge of discovering whether the Cultural Revolution ideals in Taking Tiger Mountain support Xi's Party reforms or critique Xi's 'Chinese Dream' and its implementation through regulation, ubiquity and centralisation of state power. What needs to be thought here is how these films balance the Anthropocene apocalypse as collective imaginary against the utopian imaginary of Revolution, and whether the revolutionary utopia can embrace the non-human revealed by collective Anthropocene science.
I do not intend to demean the suffering it caused when I say that the intellectual sin of the Cultural Revolution, its sin of pride, as Catholic theology would say, was to believe that it could project its collective historical trajectory into the future, in the way meteorologists work with Bayesian probabilities to predict the weather, mapping future events from older data. In this case we can say easily enough that the Cultural Revolution's imagination served a negatively imaginary (that is, false) utopia. Marx's notorious reluctance to picture the Communist future was a sound instinct. The moment utopia could be named and made the subject of a Five-Year Plan, it crashed into the impossibility of controlling the future. Under Stalin, that impossibility resulted in a revolt of the present against the imposition of a futurity that it could not bear. Under Mao it released energies beyond State or Party control, which however veered into dogma and vindictiveness that foreclosed the very future it had attempted to make possible. The process of revolution became its goal, reducing its future to its present. These crises of temporality return decades later in Hark's film. Where is its present? Either all of it is present, in the mechanical unrolling of the film and in audiences' affective engagement with it, or none of it is: Everything is either recorded or deferred, and the events that drive it are either already past or indefinitely postponed. As we noted earlier, it is perfectly possible to experience these contradictions simultaneously: that is the nature of Freud's 'fantasy' and our imagination. Imagination, especially collective imagination, is dynamic, and can adhere to both the post-apocalyptic Anthropocene scenario and the utopia of a revolution that is never over, always future, therefore undefined, and thus open to transforming not only human society but the technologies and ecologies that permeate it and that it permeates. The subjunctive quality of utopian imagination is experimental. The imagination that runs through an experiment is not trapped in certainty, like the Great Leap Forward. It operates instead as a precursor to actuality, permanently unsure of its own truth but willing to take the strategic risk of gambling on it.
Xie Tieli's film, unlike Tsui Hark's, does not have any pretensions to verisimilitude. Its declamatory acting and refusal of illusion ask its audience instead to participate in an experiment: What could, or might, or should the world be like? It does not work on the discursive axis of truths and lies, both of which depend for their action on their conformity to rules of well-made statements, but to the subjunctive axis of fictions and fantasies, further gravitating towards the fictional, opposed to the defining characteristic of fantasy: that we believe it. We do not believe in the fiction of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Suspending disbelief, we understand its experiment with consciousness as an experiment in what might or could become the case: a subjunctive mode. It remains however prey to the last elements of pride that undercut the ambitions of both Science and the Cultural Revolution, the pride of scientific Marxism as practiced in the middle decades of the twentieth century, that reduced the mountain to a painted backdrop against which the great experiment of collective consciousness might be enacted. The exclusively human idea of collectivity in the Cultural Revolution, alienating the mountain first as painting and then as backdrop obscuring the real landscape, belongs to a first phase in making the ecological relation: escape from individuation. Aesthetically, Tsui Hark needed to shoot the remake in order to overcome the human privilege of 1970s revolution.
As Clark (2011) argues, if climate change is not caused by human action, then it is caused by inhuman forces, and we should be even more afraid. The political Anthropocene is a mass dystopia brought about by the realisation that (perhaps because we have loved it so little) nature does not necessarily love us. The Anthropocene is a shared imaginary as powerful as the nation-state, which however we are unable to strategise because we continue to believe that we humans alone are capable of causing anything. The classical Chinese word qi (not quite the term shi which I'm grateful to Christian Quendler for pointing me towards in François Jullien's book The Propensity of Things [Jullien 1995]) is probably best translated into the Latin term anima, breath and spirit, with the added sense qi has of weather but also of vigour. Imagination is animation as environmental but also as vigour and therefore action. Animation is a quality of anything, human or otherwise, that has anima or qi, that is capable of action. Qi calls up that kind of imagination that allows humans to identify with the world and its inhabitants, including the inhabitation of mountains, 'thinking like a mountain' in Aldo Leopold's phrase (Leopold [1949] 2020, 120), but therefore equally recognises that the world might animate us.
It is not only the biosphere but the lithosphere that is alive: Nigel Clark's Inhuman Nature (Clark 2011) is especially revealing on this propensity of rock to shock the human world. As we imagine the Anthropocene, we need also to understand the affordances of imagining: that it may be a collective action. Animating Tiger Mountain required money and skill but also minerals and energy, extracted from geological and topological sources like mountain dams. As material practice, cinema is already technologically inextricable from ecology, including any ecology it represents. The supply chain collective that imagines Tiger Mountain, involving humans, technologies and ecologies, offers the possibility of imagining these three phyla as they might be, after the worst has already happened. This collective ecological imagining of the qi of the mountain provides tools for a potentially strategic imagination of less catastrophic ecological futures. The first Tiger Mountain failed to undertake this imagining, but in the latter film these very failures open up avenues for thinking what collective imagining might be. We confront the Anthropocene best when we understand that imagining is dangerous when it is predictive and most productive when it operates in the subjunctive. As psychedelic singer-songwriter Donovan so astutely observed, back in the acid-fuelled 1960s, '[f]irst there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is'. This flickering between being and nonbeing, the in-between of appearance and disappearance, between the mountain and its place, between being for humans and retreat into its own reality, this oscillation is the zone of the subjunctive, that disturbs the founding relation between humans and their objectified world, to allow the flourishing of a morethan-human collective capable of imagining a world that survives. In the wake of the Uttar Pradesh dam disaster of February 2021, when the Himalayas revolted against the planned economies of India and China and their hydro schemes' massive changes to the mountains' albedo, we begin to understand the imagined mountain as pars pro toto metonym for the possibility of another relation that cinema's technological mediations simultaneously make apparent and enact.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
The writing of this article was supported by a grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF P 32994 Einzelprojekte): Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes and the Alpine Model; This contribution was written with support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 32994-G.