Respond to nine of the following ten questions and submit this homework as “first draft”. Copy-and-paste this assignment directly into your folder in Teams and write your responses there. Point deduction applies to perfunctory and/or inadequate answers. As rough draft, I still expect your thought to be clear and coherent; no point taken off for syntactical errors or poor diction. I’ll offer feedback and help you develop your final draft for the first paper.
- So far, which films (including the Chinese language films you previously saw with English subtitles before taking this class) strike you as most representative of “Chinese culture”? Explain how they are meaningful and/or uninteresting to you as Chinese or American.
- What were your gut-level reactions to Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman? Be very truthful to your actual viewing experience, both as an intellectual and as a paying moviegoer.
- What were your gut-level reactions to Wayne Wang Chinese Box? Be very truthful to your actual viewing experience, both as an intellectual and as a paying moviegoer.
- What were your gut-level reactions to Peter Chan’s Comrades, Almost A Love Story? Be very truthful to your actual viewing experience, both as an intellectual and as a paying moviegoer.
- What were your gut-level reactions to Sai Mingliang’s Vive l’amour? Be very truthful to your actual viewing experience, both as an intellectual and as a paying moviegoer.
- How do they support or undermine the argument of Sheldon Lu? “The globalization of cinema brings with it an erosion of the fixed geographic boundaries of nation-state. Yet it may not necessitate the disappearance and homogenization of cultural and ethnic identity. At times, transnationalism in fact strengthens and reasserts a sense of cultural selfhood”.
- As far as these individual films go, how useful is the rubric of “Sino-phone film”? Do you find true “Taiwan’s and Hang Kong’s relations with China are ambivalent, involving both identification with and resistance to ‘Chinese’ culture and the hegemony of the nation-state”?
- In what sense is the study of these films limited by the “national cinema” approach and to what degree you would agree with critic Yingjin Zhang who calls for more cultural perspectives with regard to truth, morality, and subjectivity?
- In the Chinese language films, would you say you detect more local attachments or global attachments? examples? Is your cultural identity (or humanity) challenged by these directors? How?
- Yingjin Zhang says, “Even the concept of ‘national cinema’ itself has proven to be far from unproblematic, the critics have advocated a shift from national cinema to ‘the national’ of a cinema—a shift that allows for diversity and flexibility rather than unity and fixity.” Give examples for why you think it makes more/less sense to study the films within the context of a national history/culture than simply cinema studies.
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Larger discussions about cultures and civilizations