Welcome to the Chinese cinema in the Bay Area Group Research Blog! - 2/2/2022
Welcome to our class research blog! This is the blog website for the Chinese 172/Film 145 class at UC Berkeley during the Spring 2022 semester. This blog is meant to be a record of our research process and also a way for us to share findings and questions with each other.
A brief description of our class assignment: Our class is working in small groups to each research a theater, performance venue, film festival, recurring film series, or other form of screening program culture in the Bay Area, and to write about its relationship with Chinese (and when applicable, Asian-Pacific Islander) film, media, and cinema. With guidance from class research workshops and library tours, each group will investigate primary or archival research sources through the UC Berkeley libraries, local libraries in the Bay Area, interview and oral historical material, as well as online archives and sources. A central question that each group will reflect on and address throughout the process is to question how Chinese cinema has been presented through that screening venue, space, or program, and how our own understanding of Chinese cinema as well as cinema screening culture transforms during our research process.
Each project group will co-author 5 total blog posts on this blog website over the course of the semester to document their process of research and decision-making, and to share archival media, sonic, and visual materials with their classmates, instructor, and other interested readers.
How are groups picking topics? Each group will consider investigating materials at or related to local theater venues and film organizations (such as the ones listed below) when considering how to narrow down their research scope. They may also look through an official website with archives of past programs, and groups may also consider narrowing down their scope to a specific film festival from a specific time period or year; or if applicable, a film series or program that is particularly relevant to Chinese language cinema. Groups may also start looking through catalogs, indexes, and historical literature at our university libraries and off-campus libraries, to get ideas at the beginning or later on during their research.
Film venues, organizations, festivals to start from:
- Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) - film series and screenings
- Center for Asian American Media Film Festival (CAAMFest)
- SFFilm (San Francisco International Film Festival)
- SF Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theater
- SFMoma and its previous film series
- Mill Valley Film Festival
- The Roxie Theater in San Francisco, and any associated film festivals
- Historical theaters in SFChinatown (e.g. Great Star Theater, Grandview, Belle Union, the Pagoda Theaters) or Oakland Chinatown (Grand Lake Theater, Fox Theater, Paramount Theater)
- Other festivals or venues based in the Bay Area when finding relevant and meaningful connections to this project.
Libraries and Archives to start from:
- C.V. Starr East Asian Library
- BAMPFA Library and Study Center
- Doe Library Main Stacks
- Bancroft Library
- Ethnic Studies Library
- South/Southeast Asia Library
- And many other libraries on and off-campus, including the San Francisco City Library
Where we are right now: It is week 3 of the semester, and we have just started having in-person classes back on campus! 8 research groups have been assigned, and at the end of our class on 2/1 each group spent a few minutes to meet each other and coordinate a first meeting outside of class to discuss their research topic. It was great to see the energy of each group in the classroom. The first blog post will be uploaded next week, and each group will introduce themselves and their ideas and questions regarding their research topic.
We are looking forward to seeing what each group will post next week! Wishing you all a great first group meeting and discussion!
Happy year of the Tiger,
Linda Zhang (Instructor)
Hello! We are group 4 made up of Cosette Moskowitz, a 5th-year film and cognitive science double major; Jennifer Garcia-Tabarez, a 3rd-year film major and creative writing minor; Miguel Balderrama, a third-year transfer film major; and Eric Wu, a 4th-year economics and data science double major. We are all really excited to get started with this research project and hopefully explore what the libraries have to offer on campus. We are collectively interested in researching a film festival in the bay area and are excited to look into ones with rich Chinese-American or Chinese history. We found the Asian American International Film Festival, which is now in its 45th year, and are excited to dive in and explore this a little deeper as a strong contender for our topic choice. We think it would be interesting to look at past winners of the festival and examine them as hallmarks of what was popular at the time and if those films reflected the sociopolitical climate at the time. What changed over the years? Or are the issues the films were concerned with still prevalent today?
ReplyDeleteOn our first meeting, we discussed time availability and general interests, which let us arrive at the idea of picking a film festival rather than a theater specifically. To start our research, Miguel volunteered to compile a list of the past film festival winners to help us decide which ones we want to focus on and talk about. We have not yet decided how many films we want to pick (ie how broad our time range will be) but we are thinking it would be more relevant to pick a more contemporary period and possibly contrast that with an older period to help examine time period differences and their effects on film. Eric volunteered to do primary source translation which will be super helpful in exploring what the libraries have to offer. Jennifer is going to start looking into finding sources to guide our research, and Cosette will handle the bulk of the blog post writing. We decided to divide up the group research needs, but we are either considering having a rotating author (depending on our schedule restraints) or collectively writing each post as a group.