Phenomenological Approaches to Teaching Chinese Film

This chapter advocates for a phenomenological approach to teaching Chinese film, arguing that it makes foreign language films more accessible to an undergraduate audience with little or no knowledge of Chinese language, history, society, or culture. It is based on a module I designed and taught for a second-year film studies undergraduate degree at a British university from 2015-19, which examined the changes that have occurred in China from 2000 to the present day, by analysing how this period of transition has been reflected, explored, symbolised, and constructed in contemporary Chinese film. The module began with Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” – feelings that concretise around a particular time and place that are captured and evoked in art and culture – and considered how film records and evokes these feelings in ways that are specific to the medium itself and the viewers’ experience of the medium. The central idea of this module was to use selected Chinese films from a variety of genres as entry points into examining this dynamic period of China’s massive social and economic change, while building a larger contextual comprehension of how this era has been experienced, translated, and evoked through film.