Readings in Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a textbook designed for U.S. collegestudents who have studied Chinese for three years or more, and is sufficient for asemester's worth of coursework. It was field-tested in both the Princeton University EastAsian Studies Department as well as in the Princeton in Beijing intensive summer program,to the warm reception of students and teachers alike.

In theory, movies are in many ways the ideal tool for the teaching of Chinese as aforeign language. Not only are students able to learn while enjoying the movie, they wouldalso be able to better enter into the lives and customs of the Chinese, thanks to the natureof the cinematographic medium itself. But practically speaking, there are oftenconsiderable difficulties in adopting movies as teaching material.

In the U.S., movies have been used to teach Chinese as a foreign language formany years. Typically, every word and every line of the movie is transcribed onto the page,then appended with English annotations or translations of vocabulary words and grammarstructures; what one gets is, in effect, a reader for the movie. One advantage of this methodis that students, from reading the entire dialogue script, would be able to attain a thoroughunderstanding of the movie in concern. The great disadvantage, though, is that it wouldnormally take several weeks to cover one movie, which can become either repetitious oruninteresting to both students and teachers. Moreover, not every part of the movie may besubstantial enough for sustained discussion and language study.

With these problems in view, in Readings in Contemporary Chinese Cinema wehave written a Synopsis as well as a Critique for each movie selected; in some cases, theSynopsis and the Critique are combined into a single essay. We have also extractedsegments of the movie dialogue, adding vocabulary and sentence structure explanations toit. By organizing the materials in this way, teachers are afforded with more options whenteaching, particularly with regard to accommodating the different difficulty levels tostudents in class. More advanced students, for example, are free to delve into discussionafter only reading the Synopsis and the Critique, whereas less proficient students couldperhaps begin with the dialogues to better acquaint themselves with the material.

The movies we have selected are relatively well-known works produced within thelast twenty years by filmmakers from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Thecontents cover both urban and rural life, while the time-period captured falls broadlywithin the twentieth century. Each movie reflects, on different levels and from differentperspectives, the immense panorama that is contemporary Chinese society.

In the development of this textbook, the dialogues for Not One Less and A Sighwere based on the previous work of Prof. Yongping Zhu and Ms. Jingyu Wangrespectively; Mr. Zhengguo Kang provided invaluable constructive criticism to the project;and Ms. Yan Xia and Mr. Teng-Kuan Ng carefully proofread the manuscript and improvedon the English annotations. We would like to extend our deep gratitude to all of them here.Needless to say, all errors are strictly the responsibility of the authors.

Chih-p'ing ChouWei WangJoanne ChiangJanuary 26, 2007Princeton University