Transnational East Asian Cinemas: Local Ghosts, Global Monsters

Catalog description

This freshman seminar comparatively studies the forms and histories of East Asian cinemas in the context of transnationalism and globalization. The course revisits the theoretical debates on the concept of national cinema by exploring the transnational connections among different film cultures in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. We will emphasize as much the local diversities and specificities as the stylistic, generic, thematic, and industrial conjunctions across national/cultural boundaries. While surveying major genres and auteurs in East Asian cinemas, such as Wong Kar-Wai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Ozu, Kurosawa, and Bong Joon-ho, through the theoretical frameworks of nationalism, transnationalism, post-colonialism, and globalization, the course will particularly focus on the shifting representation of identities of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in the rapidly changing social, political, and cultural environments in the region.