EALL 476
TR12:00pm-1:15pm
STJHN 13
Fall 2009
Professor Hui Jiang
Office: Moore #374
Office Hour: T 2-3pm
Perspectives on Chinese Cinema
Objectives: This class will examine some most popular political and cultural topics in contemporary
Chinese society through cinematic representation. These heated topics reflect a facet of the quick
change of Chinese people’s everyday life, their political concerns, moral mores, cultural anxieties, and
in general, the breath and depth of Chinese people’s spirituality. As the most powerful medium, cinema
has played a significant role in shaping these cultural realities. Our approach is both social and
aesthetic, combining a cultural analysis of society with an aesthetic critique of the ideology of the
reviewed films. This is not a class to teach a social-economic knowledge of China, but rather we are
mainly concerned about how the ideological structure of each film is developed by means of cinematic
techniques and how it makes fiction and illusion look real and in this way affects its audience’s
mentality.
Student Learning Outcomes:
1. Students will learn a basic social knowledge of contemporary China and its cinematic
achievements
2. Students will be able to do a preliminary analysis of the ideological framework of a film by
focusing its technical features
3. Students will be able to read a film review by generalizing its main critical ideas with their own
critical commentaries on them.
Textbooks:
The textbook is required and can be purchased at the UH bookstore. There is an Electronic Reserve in
the library for this course. Students are expected to bring the assigned reading material to classmeetings on the day of discussion
1. Zhen Zhang, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twentieth
Century (Duke University, 2007)
2. Electronic Reserve (ER)
Requirements:
1. Regular class-attendance is mandatory according to UH regulations. All absences have to be
excused in writing, and more than 3 absences will lower the final course grade by one full
grade. Late arrivals exceeding 15 minutes will count as full absences.
2. Active class-participation: Students are expected to read the assigned texts before class
meetings. One oral presentation.
3. Two take-home essays (4 pages, double-spaced, each, typed and properly annotated); Basic
writing skills are required to pass this course.
4. Weekly Journals (one page, double-spaced, each). Students are required to write a weekly journal on
each of the films to be discussed Due Date: every Monday 12am (late submission will not be
accepted).
Evaluation Criteria: Since this course is an upper-division undergraduate and a designated Focus course
(contemporary ethical issues) with a strong emphasis on critical and analytical thinking, student performance
will be evaluated in the following manner, with equal emphasis on both oral and written contributions:
1. Student’s preparation of assigned materials: being able to summarize the gist of an essay or film,
grasping the author’s main argument, and providing a critical reflection.
2. Student’s ability to follow the lecture/discussions: responding sensibly to questions, contributing
intelligently to discussion, interacting sensitively with instructor and classmates.
3. Student’s writing skills: clarity in writing, coherence in structure, and consistency in argumentation.
4. Weekly Journals: 30%; Two Essays: 60%; Good Presentation: 10%.
Syllabus:
Part One: War, Film, and Ideology
Week 1: Introduction
8/25: Introduction
8/27: Showing Lu Chuan Nanjing, Nanjing (2009)
Week 2: Who Can Speak for the Dead?
9/1, 9/3: Lu Chuan Nanjing, Nanjing
Week 3: Woman Body and Revolution
9/8, 9/10, Ang Lee, Lust, Caution (Taiwan)
Critical Essay: Critical Essay: Leo Ou-fan Lee “Ang Lee's Lust, Caution and its Reception”
Week 4: Violence and Justice
9/15: Zhang Yimou, Hero
Part Two: Red Nostalgia
Week 5: “Our Passionate Past”
9/22, 9/24: Jiang Wen, In the Heat of the Sun
Critical Essay: Louise Williams “Men in Mirror: Questioning Masculine Identities in In the Heat of the
Sun”
Week 6: “Our Powerless Present”
9/29, 10/1: Meng Jinghui, Chicken Poet
Part Three: Beijing and Shanghai on Screen: Defining Chinese Metropolitanism
Week 7: Street Violence
10/6, 10/8 Wang Xiaoshuai, Beijing Bicycle
Week 8: “No More Fantasy”
10/13, 10/15: Ning Ying, I Love Beijing
Critical Essay: Cui Shuqin “Ning Ying's Beijing Trilogy: Cinematic Configurations of Age, Class, and
Sexuality”
10/18: First Take-Home Paper Due (No Weekly Journal This week)
Week 9: Fragmentation and Nostalgia
10/20, 10/22: Lou Ye, Suzhou River
Critical Essay: Linda Chiu-Han Lai “Whither the Walker Goes: Spatial Practices and Negative Poetics
in 1990s Chinese Urban Cinema”
Week 10: A Bildungsroman Film
10/27, 10/29: Zhang Yang, Sunflower
Part Four: Dark Realism
Week 11: A Small-time Thief Story
11/3, 11/5: Jia Zhangke, Xiao Wu
Critical Essay: Louise Williams “Men in Mirror: Questioning Masculine Identities in In the Heat of the
Sun”
Week 12: A Sexual Slave Story
11/10, 11/12: Li Yu, Lost in Beijing
Week 13: A Sold Woman Story
11/17, 11/19: Li Yang, Blind Mountain
Week 14: A Demolished City Story
11/24: Jia Zhangke, Still Alive
11/26: Thanksgiving
Party Five: Hou Xiaoxian’s Films and Art
Week 15: Trauma and History
12/1, 12/3: Hou Xiaoxian The Sadness of City
No Weekly Journal
Week 16: Eroticism and Exoticism
12/8, 12/10: Hou Xiaoxian, Flowers of Shanghai
12/10: Second Take-Home Essay Due
Bibliography:
Chris Berry ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991).
Chris Berry ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: British Film Institute, 2003).
Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000).
Nick Browne, Paul Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau eds., New Chinese Cinemas:
Forms, Identities, Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese
Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Paul Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press,
2005).
Poshek Fu and David Desser eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003).
Jubin Hu, Projecting a Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2003).
Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1972).
Tonglin Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh eds., Chinese-Language Film (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2005).
Ni Zhen, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Vivian Shen, The Origins of Left-Wing Cinema in China, 1932-37 (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005).
Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (London:
Reaktion Books, 1999).
Esther Yau ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001).
Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and
the New Chinese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
Yingjin Zhang ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999).
Yingjin Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the
Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: The
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002).
Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
Zhen Zhang, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
(Duke University, 2007)