Courses / Undergraduate

Summer 2020

  • Chinese Screen Culture

    Film 160 | CCN: 15261

    Jianqing Chen

    4 Units

    Session D

     

    Lecture: M,W,F   3pm-5:30pm                  Location: Online – Asynchronous Instruction

     

    Screening: M 12pm-3pm                          Location: Online – Asynchronous Instruction

     

    This course introduces a century of Chinese film and media history by focusing on aspecific topic – Chinese screen culture. Drawing on western concepts about the screen, thiscourse offers a new perspective to view Chinese film and media history bringing the changingmedia environment, apparatus, and practice to the fore. The course will trace the semanticchange of the “screen” coincided and correlated with the so-called technological innovations and mediascape transformations, investigating the screen as a projection surface (i.e. the silverscreen, or the surface on which moving images are projected), an electronic visual display (anarea on an electronic device such as a television, a computer, or a touch-screen phone on which images and texts are displayed), an interface, a console, or etc. Students will not only learn to be attentive to the material, infrastructural and formal conditions undergirding the production, exhibition, transmission, and reception of mass media in China. They will also be encouraged to discuss the meta-representation of the screen as motif or metaphor in Chinese-language moving images, thinking through the questions of national identity, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, socialism/ post-socialism, capitalism modernization and globalization. Films examined in this class will span from silent cinema to the contemporary era, covering a wide range of genres and auteurs, such as New Woman (Cai Chusheng, 1935), Two Stage Sisters (Xie Jin, 1962), Dislocation (Huang Jianxin, 1986), Ermo (Zhou Xiaowen, 1994), Suzhou River (Lou Ye, 2000), Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007), Kaili Blues(Bi Gan, 2015), Dragonfly Eyes (Xu Bing, 2017).

     

    (This course will proceed via remote instruction during Session D)