恍如隔世

Winter 2011

CMST 24909 / 34909, EALC 24909 / 34909

THE EAST ASIAN FILM MUSICAL

Michael Raine

Office Hours: WB301C Wednesdays 3-5

Screenings: Tuesday 7-10

Class meeting: Monday 1:30-2:50

Wednesday 1:30-2:50
The film musical appears as a quintessentially American form. From the development of the genre in synchronization with early sound technology to its full efflorescence in the MGM Broadway adaptations of the 1950s, nothing spoke the capital intensity of Hollywood and the ideology of Americanism more clearly than the musical. This course studies East Asian emulation of Hollywood's "transmedia exploitation" of popular music, revues, and musical films but also the musicals that blazed regional circuits through East Asia, from "oriental jazz" and the wartime films of Yamaguchi Yoshiko / Ri Ko-Ran to postwar Toho travelogues and contemporary films featuring East Asian pop stars. Main focus on Japan; also films from Hong Kong, Manchuria, Mainland China, and Taiwan.

Required Text: individual readings available through the class website

Recommended Text: (electronic copy available through the library)

Film analysis web site: on the class web site at

Week 1: Film, Music, and the Film Musical: Hollywood-Berlin-Shanghai-Tokyo-Seoul

Film and sound. Film and music. Film and popular song. East Asian film networks: colonization, influence, or structural causality? Vernacular modernism: jazz and film as global vernaculars. Global simultaneity and cultural permeability. Transcultural mimesis on a geopolitical incline. Styles of the musical: Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, classical music and operetta. Military spectacles and Depression era musicals.

Tuesday:

Screening: Singing Lovebirds (Oshidori utagassen, Japan, 1939)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Miriam Silverberg. "Japanese Modern Times"

Yueh-yu Yeh. "Historiography and Sinification: Music in Chinese Cinema of the 1930s"

Miriam Hansen. "Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale"

Week 2: Continental and Trans-Pacific Romances

Japanese Occupations and the Occupation of Japan. Japanese expansionism and cultural policy. Korea, Manchuria, Shanghai, SE Asia. Postwar echoes of wartime colonialism. US Occupation, radio, postwar melodies.

Tuesday:

Screening: My Nightingale (Watashi no uguisu, 1943 [1984])

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Shelley Stephenson. "Her Traces Are Found Everywhere- Shanghai, Li Xianglan, and the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere"

John Dower. "Cultures of Defeat"

Week 3: The postwar kayo eiga (popular song film)

Transmedia exploitation. Takarazuka and Toho engeki. Film and popular song. Watanabe productions, Pop music, TV. Race and gender in film and music. Gender and cuteness. Nikkatsu action. Genre and generation.

[no Monday class: Martin Luther King day]

Tuesday:

Screening: So Young, So Bright (Janken musume, Japan, 1955)

Wednesday:

Readings: Alan Williams. "The Musical Film and Recorded Popular Music"

Richard Dyer. "Entertainment and Utopia"

John Mundy. "Hollywood and the Challenge of the Youth Market"

*** FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE THURSDAY 12pm ***

Week 4: You too can succeed … as a Hollywood musical

Transmedia exploitation: Watanabe, Pop, TV. Broadway adaptations and Toho engeki. Blockbusters and boutique cinema. Musicals and "rhythm films".

Tuesday:

Screening: You Too Can Succeed (Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru, Japan, 1964)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Rick Altman. "The American Film Musical as Dual-Focus Narrative"

Rick Altman. "The Structure of the American Film Musical"

Week 5: Hong Kong genres: genre mixing and transcultural mimesis

History of Cathay studios. Shanghai – Malaysia connections. Postwar "East Asian film networks". Genre theory. Hong Kong mediating Asia and the world.

Tuesday:

Screening: Yeh mei gui zhi lian (The Wild, Wild Rose, Hong Kong, 1960)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Teo, Stephen. "Oh Karaoke! Mandarin Pop and Musicals"

Ho, Sam. "The Songstress, The Farmer's Daughter, The Mambo Girl, and the Songstress Again"

Ho, Sam. "Excerpts from an interview with Ge Lan"

Week 6: Techne transfer, from Japan to Hong Kong

Shaw Brothers and "techne transfer". East Asian film networks. Export-driven industrial policies. Inoue Umetsugu and musical modernity. Color, widescreen. Imagica.

Tuesday:

Screening: Hua yue liang xiao (Hong Kong Rhapsody, Hong Kong, 1968)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Yau Shuk-Ting. "The Golden Age of Japanese-Hong Kong Collaboration"

D.W.Davis and Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu. "Inoue at Shaws: The Wellspring of Youth"

*** TERM PAPER TOPIC DUE SUNDAY 12pm ***

Week 7: The Mainland musical

Hollywood influences on prewar mainland cinema. Competing histories of Chinese film. History of Chinese opera on film. CCP policy re: legends, folk song, and "kaeuta". History of non-opera musical film.

Tuesday:

Screening: Liu sanjie (Third Sister Liu, 1960)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Wai-fong Loh. "From Romantic Love to Class Struggle: Reflections on the Film Liu Sanjie"

Lydia Liu. "A Folksong Immortal and Official Popular Culture in Twentieth Century China"

Week 8: From “group sounds” to the musical avant-garde

Protest music. Utagoe and folk singing. Music and ideas of the "counterculture". The Beatles shock. Rock'n'roll and pop musicals.

Tuesday:

Screening: Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song (Nihon shunkako, Japan, 1967)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Maureen Turim. "Popular Song, Fantasies, and Comedies of Iconoclasm"

*** TERM PAPER OUTLINE AND BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE SUNDAY 12pm ***

Week 9: Asian modernity and nostalgia

Leveling of the geopolitical incline. Modernity with Asian characteristics à modernity has Asian characteristics. Accelerated modernity and loss of pleasures of "transcultural mimesis". Nostalgia for prior forms of Asian modernity.

Tuesday:

Screening: Dong (The Hole, Taiwan, Tsai Ming-liang, 1998)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Amy Herzog. "Becoming-fluid: history, corporeality, and the musical spectacle"

Hsu Jen-yi. "Re-enchanting the Everyday Banal in the Age of Globalization: Alienation, Desire, and Critique of Capitalist Temporality in Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole and What Time Is It There?"

Week 10: Pan-Asian remakes / retakes

Pan-Asian co-productions. Rise of East Asia and leveling of "geopolitical incline". Music video and the transformation of the musical. All musicals all the time…

Tuesday:

Screening: Katakuri-ke no kofuku (Happiness of the Katakuris, 2001)

Monday + Wednesday:

Readings: Tom Mes. "The Happiness of the Katakuris"

*** FINAL ASSIGNMENT DUE TUESDAY MARCH 15 @ MIDNIGHT ***

恍如隔世

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

THE EAST ASIAN FILM MUSICAL

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

艺术史