Lecture & Film: The Filmic Memory of the City. Jia Zhangke’s HAI CHANG CHUAN QI

HAI CHANG CHUAN QI  I Wish I Knew

PR China 2010. Director: Jia Zhangke. Cast: Tao Zhao. 138 mins. 35mm. Original language version with English subtitles.

The Filmic Memory of the City: I WISH I KNEW
Lecture by Vinzenz Hediger
in German

Film screening:
HAI CHANG CHUAN QI  I Wish I Knew

After the end of the first Opium War in the second half of the 19th century, the hanseatic city of Shanghai became the gateway for Western merchants and colonists to the previously inaccessible empire. Shanghai became the hub of world trade, but also the cultural centre of the new China, including a flourishing film industry. Shot as a commissioned film for the World Expo 2010, I WISH I KNEW shows the latest transformation of the city and at the same time traces its cinematic memory.

Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he heads the Research Training Group “Configurations of Film” and conducts research on the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”.

Lecture & Film

Jia Zhangke: Cinema of Transformation

From a shattered agricultural state at the end of the Cultural Revolution to the highly engineered second largest economy in the world in just under four decades: Few countries have changed as dramatically as the People’s Republic of China.

The films by Jia Zhangke, one of today’s most important Chinese directors, are seismograms of this transformation. They counter the breathtaking pace of social upheaval with a precise look and a patient rhythm; they respond to heroic future rhetoric with a sense for the abysses of everyday stories. Award-winning at festivals around the world, they also open up new possibilities for cinema as an art form.

From October 2019 to July 2020, the Lecture & Film series will focus on the work of Jia Zhangke. Renowned experts on Jia’s work, such as Dai Jinhua (Beijing), Dudley Andrew (Yale University), Cecilia Mello (São Paulo), Rey Chow (Duke University) and Victor Fan (King’s College London) will cover all facets, from major feature films to documentary works and short films.

Lecture & Film is a series of events organised by the cinema of the DFF and the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies of the Goethe University together with the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” and the DFG Research Training Group “Configurations of Film”.