World Film advice needed!

[Christine Marran]

Sarah,

I teach an introductory Asian film course and here are a few of my 
picks.  Students love Lou Ye's Suzhou River.  I highly recommend that 
film for study.  Jerome Silbergeld's chapter on that film is a good 
starting point for discussion.  The Hindi musical Lagaan is also a 
popular favorite and paired with Tsui Hark's film Once Upon a Time in 
China works well for discussing a number of issues regarding colonial 
history, the popular genre film, and the Asian genre film in world 
distribution.  JSA is good for discussing style and politics and you can 
have students do a comparative project with Shiri.  Santosh Sivan's The 
Terrorist is a little heavy on close-ups but is nice to use once in a 
while.  Students also respond to Memento Mori by Tae-Yong Kim and 
Kyu-Dong Min, which I pair with the J-horror film Suicide Club. 
Mysterious Object at Noon by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an interesting 
film for discussing the documentary form.   "The House is Black" DVD 
includes Forugh Farrokhzad's film and a number of interesting shorts by 
Moshen Makhmalbaf. They all offer more examples of variations on 
documentary styles.   I'll probably replace the Terrorist with Merhjui's 
The Cow next time around for another Iranian film.  And, of course, you 
can't go wrong with Chungking Express though my personal Wong Kar-wai 
favorite is Happy Together.  The Korean film Peppermint Candy is one to 
consider as well for thinking about issues of masculinity that come up 
in JSA.

Christine





Sarah Maline wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to pick your enormous brains, if you don't mind.  I'm hastily
> resurrecting a world film class that hasn't been taught here in many years,
> aimed at the general liberal-arts student, not film majors.  I'll show a few
> immediately postwar films like Tokyo Story and Pather Panchali but focus the
> course on very contemporary film and I'd love to hear your suggestions!  On
> Japanese films, too--I've had the luxury of teaching contemporary Japanese
> film and I'm having a terrible time narrowing my list down to two or three
> films for the world course.
> 
> Many thanks for any input!
> 
> Sarah
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sarah Radley Maline
> Associate Professor of Art History
> Director, UMF Art Gallery
> University of Maine at Farmington
> Farmington, ME 04938
> tel: 207.778.7002
> fax: 207.778.7075
> 
> 
> 
> .
> 


-- 
Christine L. Marran
Asst. Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Minnesota