Travel in Space: Contemporary Cinemas of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China

3 units

The recent phase of intensive urbanization, industrialization, and globalization in Chinese regions has also mobilized multi-directional flows of migrants, tourists, workers and entrepreneurs across geographical boundaries. Moving through space, the voyagers offer changing perspectives to the cinematic mapping of socio-political relationships, histories, and cultures that constitute the identities of places. This course explores contemporary Chinese-language films that imagine trajectories between distant spaces as well as the experiences of new comers in foreign places. We will examine the current wave of travel films in Taiwan, the representation of drifters in Chinese urban films, as well as the imagination of migration in Hong Kong cinema. We will also explore theories that draw connections between movement, space, and cinema. REQUIRED SCREENINGS: TBA