This article explores the potential of film criticism for teaching regional film history in undergraduate survey courses, especially in area studies programs. I understand film criticism as an argument-driven interpretation that students pursue in their encounter with a given cinematic text—be it a film, a sequence, or a shot—through a formalist approach.[1] The aim of film criticism is to identify the specifics of the text’s form and further accentuate its uniqueness against a broader pattern of filmmaking or a historical period. Practicing film criticism in a class devoted to the film history of a geographical or cultural area fosters an opposing tension between the singularity of a film and the contextual information surrounding it, such as historical background or cinema’s relation to regional politics. This focus helps students develop skills of close analysis and encourages them to reflect on generalized narratives of history, culture, and society that typically characterize textbook accounts of global film history.

While it might be commonplace to practice film criticism through formal analysis in many film classes, the disciplinary framework of area studies complicates this pedagogical standard. I teach film courses in a Chinese Studies program. Although it is impossible to fully grasp what motivates each student to enroll in the program, or to take film classes within it, my department’s practice of interviewing each high school applicant has allowed me to gain a general sense of their intentions and interests. Most of them expect to gain comprehension in Mandarin in order to facilitate their understanding of Chinese history, politics, economics—in other words, some aspects of social “reality.” Surprisingly very few of them have applied for the program out of a pure interest in Chinese literature, art history, cinema, or any other media.

On the one hand, it is an incredible gift to hear from the students their understanding of their chosen discipline. On the other hand, such a revelation poses a pedagogical challenge as to how my film courses could be relevant to them: How should I teach film criticism to students who do not see cinema as an object of study in and of itself but primarily as an aid to learning something else, such as language, twentieth-century Chinese history, or certain issues in contemporary Chinese society? Why should they take a film class when they can directly approach these subjects without the mediation of cinema?

I am aware that the dichotomy between “reality” and cinema—or between context and text—is false on many levels: the best kind of scholarship unfailingly demonstrates that to study one is to study the other; a text unique in one historical condition might be typical when contextualized differently. But some qualitative differences do distinguish a class titled “History of Chinese Cinemas” from another called “Understanding China through Film.” They entail different sets of learning objectives, assignments, means of evaluation, and perhaps most importantly, the potential contributions of film studies as a discipline. If film criticism does not constitute at least one of the cores of my teaching, my expertise matters little. Whatever the students expect to gain from my class, I would like them to take away the ability to make interpretation based on their engagement with formal features, such as identifying the moment when a point-of-view shot modifies their viewing position, discerning if a sequence is shot in studio or on location, or recognizing how their attention is guided by a certain pattern of editing. Film teachers in area studies programs may be hesitant to constantly train the students to do these “basics” in class—like we might do in Film Studies 101—for fear of sacrificing the class time devoted to the conveyance and discussion of contextual knowledge. But, when done well, formal analysis does not dichotomize between text and context; rather, it makes students consider both more carefully.

One obvious advantage of teaching a film course in area studies is that the students can mobilize their prior knowledge of the area’s history and society gained from other courses. However, a downside is that when it comes to making argument-driven interpretation, I have observed that students might pursue an unreflective historicism. To give an example, last year I showed Princess Iron Fan (dir. Wan Laiming & Wan Guchan, 1941), an animated feature adapted from a renowned episode in Journey to the West, to address the complexities of propaganda filmmaking during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The film recounts the conflict between the Monkey King and the titular princess, who holds a magical fan that can quench the flames blocking the former’s journey. All my students immediately latched onto the antagonism between the main characters and read it as a political allegory of the conflict between the Chinese and the Japanese, with the Monkey King representing the former and the princess the latter. More surprisingly, they proposed this reading despite having learned from other courses that the reality of that war was much more complex than the Chinese-Self versus the Japanese-Other, insofar as multiple ideologies competed with one another across mainland China at this time. They did not modify their reading, either, after I told them that the film passed Japanese censorship and screened in both the Japanese-occupied areas and mainland Japan.

What I learned from this class was that my delivery of mere contextual knowledge did not guide the students to make more nuanced readings. They might consume but fail to reflect on it in relation to the selected film. To help them tackle the film’s intricacies, it is more useful to foreground how specific details in the film challenge the simplified historical narrative to which they subscribe. Indeed, a close analysis of the film leads to a completely different interpretation. In the case of Princess Iron Fan, my students reexamined their initial reading after they considered how several characters changed their appearances and disguised themselves as their rivals. Given the plasticity of the characters’ identities—itself afforded by the plasticity of animation—some students began to decouple the characters from any intrinsic ideological position. From there, they offered a more sophisticated reading of the conflict in the narrative as a meta-reflection on the nature of propagandist creation, which might be appropriated by distinct ideologies to serve their own political agendas (hence the film’s success in Japan as well).[2]

Another example from my class that illustrates how formal analysis complicates quick allegorical readings: for the week devoted to Taiwan New Cinema, I showed Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985). The reading paired with the film was Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis’s “Challenges and Controversies of the Taiwan New Cinema,” a chapter from their book on key directors in post-80s Taiwanese cinema.[3] The chapter proposes that a central ideology undergirding New Taiwan Cinema is an emergent Taiwanese nativism against an established Sinocentric hegemony fostered by the Kuomintang, the ruling party of the time.[4] Viewing the film through the lens of this ideological conflict, my students regarded the death of several older characters—all of whom relocated to Taiwan from mainland China after the 1949 civil war—as evidence of the film’s affirmation of such a nativist subjectivity. But this reading changed after we looked at the film more closely. After a few students observed how several sequences presented a positive image of the older characters (bathed in soft, natural light; accompanied by cheerful non-diegetic music), they started to reconsider the ideological position advocated by the film. They also thought more about the film’s ending wherein the younger characters are scolded for their negligence of their grandmother’s death (leaving her rotting corpse unattended for days). Eventually the students modified their original reading of the film’s politics: while it rejects the hegemony of Sinocentrism, it also questions the legitimacy of the Taiwanese nativism. Understood as such, the film could be considered as a peculiar text at once representative of and divergent from Yeh and Davis’s broad description of Taiwan New Cinema.

While the pedagogy I am proposing here comes from my experience in Chinese Studies, I think that a renewed attention to film criticism benefits even Cinema Studies courses that hope to “globalize” their history and theory offerings. It is unrealistic to expect that either the teacher or students are equipped with sufficient contextual knowledge of all the regions in which the films are produced—not to mention the question of how much contextual knowledge is enough for one to be a “qualified” expert of a region. Even if some students are familiar with the histories and cultures of certain areas (which is likely, given the increasing diversity of the student body), such familiarity does not automatically translate into the ability to practice film criticism, a skill to be gained from paying attention to the formal features of any given film. Film instructors are qualified to teach film criticism, and teaching these skills offers instructors and students alike an opening into further learning about a film’s context. Focusing on the films themselves in class, rather than dwelling on more and more contextual information, alleviates some of the anxiety we all experience when we teach films from cultures outside of our disciplinary expertise. But this move does not necessarily foreclose the pursuit of contextual knowledge. Echoing Barthes’s renowned claim that “a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it,” to demonstrate the complexities of a cinematic text is to encourage the students to explore those of its context (such as wartime propaganda production or 80s Taiwanese cultural identity) through further reading and viewing—even if these activities ultimately take place outside of the curricular framework we set up.[5]

Pao-chen Tang is a Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, where he joined after receiving a joint PhD in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Animist Imagination: A Cinematic Aesthetics of Personhood, which provides a new way of thinking about broad-scale themes of environment and East Asian art cinemas through the logic and language of animism. His writings have been published or are forthcoming in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Early Popular Visual Culture, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

1. For an account of film criticism in relation to the specific qualities of a film, see Tom Gunning, “Film Criticism: The Challenge of the Specific,” Film Criticism 40.1 (2016). ↑

2. This reading of Princess Iron Fan speaks to the centrality of fire for both the film and wartime film culture more generally that Weihong Bao has insightfully highlighted: “Animating, metamorphosing, and corroding, [fire] moves across space and time as an agent of simultaneous assimilation and perpetual differentiation.” Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 5. ↑

3. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 55-90. Another chapter in Yeh and Davis’s book is devoted entirely to Hou. But I decided not to assign it as the required reading because it would turn the weekly focus into a study of the auteur rather than Taiwan New Cinema in general. ↑

4. Ibid., 62-64. ↑

5. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 220. ↑