LITR

This course introduces major works, genres, and waves of Chinese and Sinophone cinemas from the silent era to the present. We will discuss issues ranging from formal aesthetics to historical representation, from local film industries to transnational productions and global politics of recognition. This course does not assume prior knowledge of Chinese culture or of film studies. Instead, it seeks to provide students with a basic understanding of modern Chinese and Sinophone cultural histories through cinema, and with an essential toolkit for analyzing film and other audiovisual media, including narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound.

In addition to teaching critical approaches, the course will encourage students to creatively respond to course materials by collaborating on their own short films, beginning with the illustration of film terms in the first two weeks and culminating in the “Golden Phoenix Awards”—a class screening of final projects with Oscar-like awards in various categories. Students will enterprise with the digital media technologies at our disposal and experiment with unorthodox ways of looking at the world through amateur filmmaking.