150063 SE Literatur und Kultur (M7) (2020W)

Title: Cinema and Nation: China on Screen

This seminar centres on the relationship between cinema and nation to explore screen representations of China and Chineseness from early-twentieth-century silent cinema to contemporary digital filmmaking. It focuses on mainland Chinese film culture and covers a range of cinematic styles and genres including melodrama, horror, comedy, socialist realism, opera films, independent documentary, and women’s cinema, among others.

Selected films and readings aim to encourage participants to reflect critically on the ways in which cinema from and about China can contribute to either counter or consolidate practices of racial othering and Orientalist (self-)imagining and to disseminate triumphalist national narratives and utopian dreams alongside subaltern histories – and herstories – and alternative visions of Chinese identity and nationhood. Another aim is to illuminate cinema’s persistent entanglement with the shifting politics of the Chinese nation and the medium’s constant renegotiation with rapid, and often radical, socio-economic transformation. Each session revolves around a specific topic such as nation and modernity, nation and gender, nation and war, nation and revolution, nation and reform, nation and allegory, nation and ruins, nation and subalternity, nation and globalization, and others. Each topic is illustrated by one or more case studies (films) that form the basis of the seminar discussion.

Chinese film culture and the cinematic construction of the nation are approached not only interculturally, by paying attention to the effects of globalization and transnational trends on the Chinese film industry, but also intertextually and intermedially, by looking at cinema’s interconnections with other creative domains (e.g. literature and the visual and performing arts) and practices of adaptation and remediation.

Upon successful completion of the course, participants will acquire a foundation in mainland Chinese film history and film culture and enhance their ability to examine and interpret complex visual texts. They will learn how to apply visual analysis, close reading, and a range of theoretical approaches to assess the significance of image-making in China’s nation-building effort and to understand the role of narrative, visuality, and representation in the construction – and deconstruction – of notions of national identity and “Chineseness”. Participants will be encouraged to think about film from critical perspectives such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and in relation to theories of history and memory. Thus, the seminar will increase understanding of key concepts in film analysis and critical theory.