EAS 394-000: Screening China (Spring 2011)

Semester Details: This seminar examines Chinese cinema as a significant cultural force in twentieth-century China and beyond. It introduces students to “film in China” and “China in film,” focusing on both the development of the film industry in China and the continual reconfiguration of history and national identity in cinematic productions. It explores how individual and collective memories were recorded, interpreted, and contested in different sociopolitical contexts against the background of modern nation building. The seminar will consider such questions as how women’s virtue and modern masculinity inform the representation of national consciousness in the Republican period (1911-1949) and socialist construction after 1949; how social and national traumas were remembered in the post-Mao period after the Cultural Revolution; and how social changes in market reforms and globalization were narrated onscreen since the 1990s. Through an overview of Chinese cinema, we will not only examine the thematic concerns and the attendant socio-cultural conditions under which films were produced and consumed in China, but we will also pay attention to artistic elements and aesthetic effect of filmic texts. We will learn to "read" films closely and appreciate the techniques that make up the visual and aural languages of film as a representational form. While concentrating primarily on the cinema in the mainland, we will make excursions across the border to Taiwan and Hong Kong to sample the cinematic imaginations in the other Chinese language cinemas.