Envisioning Encounters: Missionary Filmmaking as Transnational Documentary in Twentieth Century China

7 March 2023

Across the first half of the twentieth century, American Protestant and Catholic missionaries in China produced vernacular films situated between embeddedness in local communities, contested nation-building, and Sino-US interests. Equipment-oriented engagements, influenced by international amateur film culture, drove new ways of seeing and believing. With encounters mediated by mobile film production, missionaries and Chinese Christians saw themselves as collaborators in filmmaking experiences as well as actors linking global religious and secular communities with modern visual imaginations. Behind the lens and on-screen, they helped to shape American religious and cultural influence in China while embodying cross-cultural identities, wartime traumas, and shifting modernities. In the process, missionary films blended iconography, humanitarian perspectives, and documentary impulses with vernacular visualities – ranging from private family images to eyewitness records of military atrocities and regime change. They created a mediatory visual language that transcended national borders and secular-religious divides. Some films escaped their missionary mold and entered transpacific imaginations, coming to be as much about future perceptions as about present realities. In this talk, Prof. Joseph W. Ho traces the odysseys of cameras and footage framed by evolving historical milieus and transnational visions. In doing so, he reconstructs a hitherto unexplored visual fabric – embodied in miles of 16mm film and orphaned filmmaking technologies – that bridged the American missionary enterprise and modern China. READ MORE...

新書講座： 沈志華 — 《經濟漩渦：冷戰發生的另一個解釋框架》

24 February 2023

Zoom

從經濟的視角觀察冷戰。過去的研究主要在地緣政治、安全和意識形態問題，可以換一個角度觀察。 安全和經濟兩個車輪，冷戰的發生不在“安全困境”，而在“經漩濟漩渦”。 READ MORE...