November 10th, 2017 – Yuqian Yan

Dear All,

Please join us this Friday, November 10th at 3:00 pm in CEAS 319 for a special section co-sponsored by Mass Culture Workshop and APEA Workshop, as we host Yuqian Yan, PhD Candidate in CMS and EALC. She will be presenting a draft of her dissertation chapter titled “Emplacing the Ancient: the Characters and Their World.”

This chapter is available for download here.

Please email either Panpan [panpan@uchicago.edu] or Jenisha [jenisha@uchicago.edu] for the password.

Pao-chen Tang, PhD student in CMS and EALC will serve as discussant.

Refreshments will be provided.

*** Please note the special time and location.***

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!

Yours coordinators,

Panpan and Jenisha


Emplacing the Ancient: the Characters and Their World

Location shooting was an important feature of Chinese ancient costume films (guzhuang pian) in the 1920s. Filmmakers went beyond confined studio spaces in Shanghai to search for scenic sites to locate familiar tales from the past. What motivated them to incorporate present landscapes in the representations of ancient stories? What kinds of places could be qualified as ancient settings? How did the incorporation of real sites affect audiences’ viewing experiences? This chapter studies Chinese filmmakers’ efforts to integrate contemporary locations into cinematic adaptations of traditional tales. By directly engaging the present in the portrayal of the ancient, filmmakers suggested a different possibility of relating to the past, and demonstrated the new cinematic medium’s special capacity in facilitating a new way to evoke the past through the present.

Yuqian Yan is a PhD candicate in the joint program in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

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