Rediscovering Early Chinese Cinema

Topic: Rediscovering Early Chinese Cinema: From the Archive to the Internet 
Speaker: Christopher Rea
Date and time: PST:6:00-7:30 pm on April 8, 2021
HKT:10:00-11:30 am on April 9,2021
Talk Venue: Zoom
Language: English
Inquiry: +852 34008930
Registration link

Abstract 

Viewers around the world are now discovering that, over eighty years ago, Chinese cinema had light sabers. And copies of Mickey Mouse. And full frontal male nudity. What other discoveries – besides novelties of a bygone age – lie in store for historians rediscovering Republican-era cinema, or people delving into Chinese film history for the first time? The Chinese Film Classics project, begun before and accelerated by the pandemic, is aimed at enabling a new generation of global audiences to explore Chinese film history in new ways. Working with a corpus of several score extant films, circa 1920s-1940s, Christopher Rea has been translating both famous and obscure cinematic works and making them available open access in full or in part (so far as copyright and fair use allow), via the YouTube channel Modern Chinese Cultural Studies and the website chinesefilmclassics.org. A key feature of this resource is the inclusion of playlists of hundreds of songs, special effects, animations, significant scenes, how-tos, and other thematically-arranged film clips, which enable viewers to navigate the archive of early Chinese cinema based on their own interests. Another is the production of a full online course on “Chinese Film Classics,” which discusses eleven masterpieces in the contexts of Chinese history and global filmmaking. This talk presents new web-based approaches to film research and pedagogy, and invites the participation of film scholars and film archives in further developing this open-access initiative.

Speaker 

Christopher Rea is Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, and former Director of the UBC Centre for Chinese Research. His monograph The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China won the Association for Asian Studies 2017 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (post-1900 China), and is available in Chinese as 《大不敬的年代:近代中國新笑史》. His other books include China’s Literary Cosmopolitans (2015), Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts (2011), The Business of Culture (2015) (with Nicolai Volland), The Book of Swindles (2017) (with Bruce Rusk), Imperfect Understanding (2018), China’s Chaplin (2019), and Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 (2021). His translations of over 20 early Chinese films, and a related open-access online course, can be found at chinesefilmclassics.org and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Xdirs4_JYpeyWi46h8kdA
https://asia.ubc.ca/profile/christopher-rea/ 

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