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![]() ![]() In CROCODILE DUNDEE the juniors watched, with stoicism, prostitutes fighting with pimps, a transvestite, and some sexual dalliance. Nevertheless, after my initial and crude attempt at censorship I ceased blocking the monitor. Besides, Chinese students rarely question their teachers' worth or behavior, especially those of the "Foreign Experts." When the Jack Lemmon character goes to a bar and sits directly beneath a nearly naked go-go dancer, I leaped in front of the video monitor and explained in hurried and barely coherent English that in China the showing of certain scenes was "against the rules." No one quite knew what I was saying or why I was acting so strangely, but this was my first week teaching in China and maybe the juniors assumed this was the way certain "American" teachers behave. I learned to take very little at face value about our own assumptions about China and its people as they nervously entered the 1990s.īecause I had been warned that it was forbidden to show scenes involving nudity and any suggestion of sexuality, I took the rather severe and absurd step of censoring the first film, THE ODD COUPLE. As for myself, I learned a lot about our Chinese college students, not all of which was pleasant, and most of which highlighted the complexities and contradictions of politics and ideology in China. No doubt our students learned a lot about the West, though clearly their perspective was shaped by Hollywood. A few of the more determined film lovers chose to see these films while their fellow students were on the streets boycotting classes and keeping the army out of the city. Every week, from the beginning of September through the first two weeks in May, 1989, just before Beijing was placed under martial law and the schools were shut, my senior and junior classes saw a film. I planned to use film as a way of illustrating U.S. ![]() I was to scheduled to teach a junior-level course called American Survey and a senior-level course called Western Culture. ![]() They sent this "video letter" to our students at Ramapo College, hoping to promote international understanding and communication and waiting for a return letter. Her students, the junior class, wrote and performed a series of short videotapes about their lives in China. My wife used the camera principally to teach oral and visual communication skills. We had been assigned to teach a variety of English and communication courses and planned to use feature films. Against standing regulations to have all videos inspected at the airport, we had in our suitcases about thirty U.S. We arrived in Beijing with a multi-format VCR, monitor, and camcorder. friends fleeing, we left China with our six year old daughter. Three days after the army moved into Tiananmen, after we'd been properly unnerved by the sight of dead students (not our own), burning military vehicles, and the sight of our U.S. We were scheduled to return home in August, 1989, but when the shooting began in Tiananmen Square the night of June 3 and into the morning of the following day, we started to pack. This is a small four-year college, one of perhaps six in China, which produces most of the country's tourist guides and hotel administrators. In the Year of the Democratic Movement in the summer, 1988, Ramapo College of New Jersey, a largely suburban, middle-income state college, sent my wife and me to the People's Republic of China to teach for a year in the Beijing Institute of Tourism. movies in China by Peter Scheckner JUMP CUTĬopyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1992, 2006 ![]()
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