Watching foreign films almost necessarily places the viewer in the field of anthropology in which to study a different culture. But what if the people we see on the screen are already conscious of themselves being seen by the Other and familiar with the cinematic discourses and cultural theories with which to exoticize their own society? What if these film productions, which we take to represent the history, custom and social reality of a foreign culture, are but fabulous spectacles of the "Orient" that never really existed? This course studies several narrative films made in the last two decades in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as examples of auto-ethnographic texts in which the Chinese reinvent themselves as well as their past. The selected films are also to be looked at as utopian fantasies and sentimental approaches (on the part of the directors) to pre-industrial or primitive cultures. As such these films offer alternative views to or compensatory adjustments for man's conscious attitudes toward modern civilization.

"I believe that in order to rethink the issue of the national and cinema, it is necessary to return to the question of national agency and other types of collective agencies. . . . the variety of such significations itself belies their frequent significations of 'China' as singular, essential, and naturalized, revealing instead not that 'China' is a nonexistent fiction but that it is a discursively produced and socially and historically contingent collective entity. In this sense, it is not so much China that makes movies, but movies that help to make China."

Chris Berry, Can China Make Movies? Or, Do Movies Make China?

"The production of images is the production not of things but of relations, not of one culture but of value between cultures; even as we see 'Chinese' stories on the screen, we are still confronted with an exchange between 'China' and the West in which these stories seek their market."

Rey Chow, Primitive Passions

"The relatively common denominator between the various aspects of Orientalism is the line separating Occident from Orient and this is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human production, which I have called imaginative geography. This is, however, neither to say that the division between Orient and Occident is unchanging nor is it to say that it is simply fictional."

Edward Said, Orientalism Reconsidered

Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice, and its psychic malaise. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious when a poet or seer lends expressions to the unspoken desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to its fulfillment, regardless whether this blind collective need results in good or evil, in the salvation of an epoch or its destruction.

Carl Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature