East Asian Studies Workshop Movie Screening

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Welcome back! The new academic year has started rolling, which means that the East Asian Studies Workshop (EASW) is back too for another round! For this, the Workshop’s 6th year, the EASW has two new coordinators: Tim Young, a third year PhD student in EALC who specializes in modern Japanese literature, and Likun Yang, a second year PhD student in EALC who specializes in premodern Chinese literature.

We are honored to serve the graduate students and faculty here at Stanford who are engaged in East Asia-related work and would like to thank both our immediate predecessors – Mia Lewis and Xiao Rao – and all the other past coordinators for laying the groundwork for us. Furthermore, we are grateful to Professor James Reichert for his supervision and to Professor Yiqun Zhou, the EASW’s faculty supervisor last year, for her work and help.

As is custom, there will be 3 Workshop events per quarter in the academic year 2016-17. The first event for the fall quarter is a movie screening and discussion on Friday, October 21st, from 5:00-9:30 PM.  We will view two East Asian films from the 90s that bring different takes on the detective story, urban living, and (post)modern anomie:

Wang Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express (1994) follows the stories of two melancholy Hong Kong policemen who fall in love with mysterious female figures.  Eschewing many established narrative techniques, however, the director brings the visuality of his medium to the fore, mixing both film and video and employing still images and slow motion to depict Hong Kong’s urban world and the lives of characters that, in the words of one critic, “have all been driven to desperation, if not the edge of madness, by the artificial lives they lead, in which all authentic experience seems at one remove.”

If Chungking’s characters exist at the edge of madness, those in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) head right over the edge without looking back.  Cure tells a story of a worn down Tokyo detective who deals with a series of gruesome murders committed by seemingly unconnected people who have no explanation for their actions. Even as the investigation begins to coalesce around a central suspect, however, exact details and definitive explanations remain tantalizingly out of reach, until the diegesis of the film itself begins to break down along with its main character.

Dinner will be served with the viewing, and discussion will follow.

Time: 5 PM – 9:30 PM, Friday, October 21st, 2016

Place: Knight Building, Room 201

RSVP: https://goo.gl/forms/FSffoIaVtX7lT4Jk2

If you plan on attending the screening, please RSVP as soon as you can.

And then bring your heart (for the movies), mind (for discussions) and body (for food and drinks) to the night.  We look forward to seeing you all there!

Sincerely,

Tim Young & Likun Yang

Co-coordinators, East Asian Studies Workshop, 2016-2017

Also stay tuned for updates on these upcoming events:

* Book Talk: Dr. Heekyoung Cho, University of Washington – Friday, 11/11/2016

* Graduate Student Forum: Writing Exchange and Discussion – December 2016