![]() Nick Stember created the transcript, which has been edited for length.Ī full video of the event (104 minutes), which was produced by the USC U.S.-China Centre, is available on YouTube as: “Christopher Rea and Henry Jenkins on how vaudeville differed between Hollywood and China.”Ĭhristopher Rea: I’m flattered to be sharing the stage with Henry Jenkins, an author whose works I’ve admired for a long time and whose approach to understanding culture I find extremely innovative and inspiring. The event was co-sponsored by the USC Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the Department of Asian Studies of the University of British Columbia, and was made possible thanks to the assistance of Professor Brian Bernards and Brianna Correa. The following is a transcript of a conversation between Christopher Rea and Henry Jenkins that took place at the University of Southern California on March 2, 2016. Henry Jenkins is Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and is author of more than fifteen books about various aspects of American media, including What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (Columbia, 1989). He is author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), which won the 2017 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (post-1900 China) of the Association for Asian Studies. ![]() Illustrating the discussion are clips from a variety of films, from early works by Charlie Chaplin to the short-lived era of cinematic satire in Mao’s China.Ĭhristopher Rea is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. It offers a guided tour of cinematic comedy in comparative perspective, drawing out resonances between Hollywood and Chinese films from the 1910s to the 1950s. The following conversation between Henry Jenkins, a media scholar who works primarily on American popular culture, and Christopher Rea, a cultural historian of China, explores comic convergences on the silver screen, focusing on filmmakers who embraced a vaudevillian aesthetic of visceral comedy and variety entertainment. But what did such visual gags look like in films made in Shanghai, as opposed to Los Angeles? How did filmmakers from different cultural traditions share or adapt comic tropes-and which ones? And how did their comedy change with technology, such as the advent of sound cinema, or with politics, war, and revolution? People climb into boxes and are tossed around they jerry-rig all manner of dwellings and conveyances they leap out of windows, crash through doors, dangle from clock towers, and slide down staircases they appear and disappear like ghosts. ![]() Slapstick performance and trick cinematography dominated early global cinema. MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August 2017) A Conversation between Christopher Rea and Henry Jenkins
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