 Hello, my name is Rosella Ferrari, I'm a reader in Chinese and theatre studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and I teach modules relating to cinema and performance cultures. In Chinese cultures on screen and stage students learn about key issues and events in the often interconnected histories of Chinese film and theatre since the 20th century. So we study the origins of cinema in the so-called opera films based on indigenous theatrical forms, we look at the origins of Chinese modern theatre in Japan, then we look at some examples of silent cinema in the so-called Golden Age of Shanghai filmmaking and then we move on to studying the politics of socialist cinema and theatre under Mao and during the Cultural Revolution. And then we look at post-socialist practices in film and theatre, for example Chinese new so-called new wave or new Chinese cinemas, independent documentary filmmaking, we look at women's cinema, commercial cinema, avant-garde performance and other genres and trends. This course is quite interdisciplinary because we look at the interconnections between film and theatre but also between film, theatre and other media or disciplinary areas, for example literature and video making or the visual arts and we also look at questions of adaptation, intermedia and intercultural adaptation. Chinese film and theatre are placed in a global context and we contextualize them with respect to transnational developments. We look, for example, at historic connections between China and Hollywood including questions of representations of China and Chineseness in classic Hollywood cinema and also in more recent films and this also includes questions of self-exoticism and self-orientalism and moreover we investigate connections between the cinema and theatres of China and those of the rest of the Chinese speaking region, for example Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and other areas. This module is designed for students with knowledge of Chinese intermediate or advanced level and is one of the main language-based disciplinary options in year three and four of the BA Chinese degrees. So in the seminars we read a variety of Chinese language texts related to the weekly viewings, the weekly screenings and for example we can read screenplays, we read scripts, we read letters, archival, historical documentation, reviews, pieces of critical essays and other such documents. There are two contact hours per week, one lecture and one seminar and in terms of assessment the first is a choice between a reaction paper, a short film analysis and a video presentation, the second is a quiz and the third is either an essay that shows evidence of use of Chinese language sources or a critical commentary to one of the Chinese language texts that we have read and discussed in class during the course. This module cannot be taken in conjunction with the non-language-based module, cinema and performance in China, critical and historical approaches because of content overlap, so the two modules share a lecture and have their own separate tutorials, seminars actually. I look forward to meeting you in class.