CHIN 1085/JPNSE 2085—Intro to East Asian Cinema
Charles Exley, 106 Lawrence Hall Wednesdays, 1:00 PM to 4:50 PM
CHIN 2088—New Chinese Cinema
Kun Qain, 206 Cathedral of Learning, Wednesdays, 1:00 PM to 4:50 PM
The 1980s witnessed the significant rise of Chinese cinemas in film industry. The technological, narrative, and aesthetic breakthrough of the so-called “New Wave” films contributes to the diversity and vitality of world cinema in the new era, which merits serious scholarly attention. This course introduces different ways of reading Chinese cinemas in greater China region (Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), specifically focusing on issues related to history, modernity, spatial and temporal representations of national, gender, and cultural identities. Well-known Chinese directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, Edward Yang, and Wong Kar-wai will be studied through the 1980s and 1990s "New Wave Cinemas." We will also study the distinct techniques and styles of the rising "Sixth Generation" directors (such as Jiang Wen and Jia Zhangke) to see how key values of traditional Chinese culture and society have been contested and reinvented under the global conditions.
COMMRC 3326—Seminar in Media Studies
Ronald Zboray, 1414 Cathedral of Learning, Mondays, 12:00 PM to 2:55 PM
Media theory is vast, unwieldy, messy, and perhaps too often surprisingly unrelativistic, uninquiring of its own social origins and complicities with regimes of power, and pitched at a level of generalization that cannot account for the world’s teeming array of social difference, based on ability, age, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality, and their myriad intersectional embodiments.
This seminar selectively survey some of the most common active areas of media theorization, past and present, in the critical light of social difference, not so much to challenge the theories themselves, but to push their implications to accommodate social diversity, equity, and inclusion. While it is true that some areas of media theory, such as those emerging from feminism or postcolonialism, were born attuned to difference, others have side-stepped the issue in their initial formulations, if not always in their later applications.
The course proceeds by examining, through guided discussion of assigned readings, specific concepts in their originating circumstances and under the critical microscope of social difference. Rubrics generating such concepts might include, for example: Affordance; Apparatus; Colonization; Commoditization; Contexture; Convergence; Disjuncture; Ecology; Frame; Game; Gaze; Hegemony; Ideology; Imaginary; Infrastructure; Interpellation; Mediatization; Network; Political Economy; Polysemy; Prosthesis; Public Sphere; Polysemy; Reception; Remediation; Representation; Ritual; Sensorium; Sign; Simulacrum; Stereotype; Surveillance; System; and Weaponization. Seminar members discuss how such conceptual areas, if they are not already attentive to social difference might be adapted or expanded to embrace it, thereby advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, in the practice of media theorization.
ENGFLM 2451/FMST 215—Film History/Theory 1
Elizabeth Reich, 239 Cathedral of Learning, Tuesdays, 1:00 PM to 4:50 PM
This seminar covers the global emergence of the cinema at the turn of the last century as an artistic and technological form that itself created national industries and practices; new and public spheres and a modernist sensorium, along with what Miriam Hansen has called a “vernacular modernism.” Considering the relationship between new technologies and global distribution through 1950, the course will focus in particular on developments in the cinema in relation to globally-significant historical moments and political movements, beginning with the rise of the newsreel as a method for documenting war and the U.S.’s imperial engagements. While we attend to national cinema histories and industries, the seminar takes as a premise that the actual history of film and its production, distribution, viewership and ascendence as a culturally-significant art and leisure activity is in fact transnational and global.
Films and accompanying criticism and theory include works from France, Germany, Iran, the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and the USA, and conclude with a case study of Vietnamese filmmaking and distribution in villages by crews trained in Cuba by Soviet practitioners. We will also study and practice early methodological approaches to film analysis, including phenomenology, reception studies, and semiotics as well as feminist criticism, African American spectatorship studies, and the work of the Frankfurt School. We will take up questions of minority cinema, public spheres, censorship, genre conventions, propaganda, and documentary and experimental forms as well as the challenge of Hamid Naficy’s theory of diasporic and “accented” cinema. Seminar members will gain knowledge, including: exposure to a wide range of films, knowledge of distribution, technological, and industrial practices and shifts in the cinema until 1950, a broad understanding of film history during the period(s), film theory that informed and has been based on filmmaking during this time, and significant scholarship on silent, transnational, early sound, global, and war era cinemas, experimental and documentary filmmaking practices, and the impact of early Black American filmmaking and representation in the U.S. and beyond.