Exposition analysis

one-third of all pay in the United States.

Having examined the fundamental American values and ideology, the film images shall be first analyzed from this perspective: how American values have influenced the selection of film characters and the storyline. The whole film will be divided into units: exposition, the stories of Mrs. Liao, Sun Feng, Xiaocui, Jinyang, Yang Fuzi, Vicent Luo, Huahan, Eliza & Zhuli. Within each unit, we shall analyze images / sequences in relation to both American values and historical Western images of China.

CHAPTER 5

“China, the oldest civilization on earth, a land founded on extraordinary customs and rituals, celebrated monuments without equal, preserving thousands of years of learning, a country that is the home to the greatest population on the planet.

1.3 billion people, a nation that is set to become the world’s next super power.

This is the story of the fastest growing country on earth, of the dreams and challenges driving its people, of individual struggle and triumph. How is the world’s largest communist state becoming its most powerful economy? Can this ancient civilization survive its breakneck journey into the future? And what is the price in this world for its change? This is the story of the greatest transformation on earth, and the people living in its heart. This is the story of life behind the Great Wall.”

Some words in the above narration are consistent with the concept of antiquity which was examined in the context of historical Western images of China. Literally, “oldest”

and “thousands of years”, for instance, remind us of the antiquity of the Chinese history and culture. “Customs” and “ritual” imply the mystery and exoticism of the oriental culture. “Greatest population”, “1.3 billion”, and “next super power” indicate a correlation between a populous country and a threatening force. When the words are matched with the visual images, the messages of sentences in the voice-over may be weakened, enforced or even changed. To understand exactly which effect is produced here, we need to further analyse the film elements of the exposition sequence.

5.1.2 Sequence protocol

(1) 00:00:17 – 00:00:22, Pan shot of the Great Wall (2) 00:00:23 – 00:00:27, Satellite animation

(3) 00:00:28 – 00:00:44, Monks beating the water, medium shot of Kung Fu master moving, full shot of monks practicing martial art skills, monks in traditional costumes holding a prayer ceremony

(4) 00:00:45 – 00:00:49, Crane shot of the Forbidden City

(5) 00:00:50 – 00:00:56, Medium shot in zoom out and overhead camera angle of a man performing calligraphy

(6) 00:00:57 – 00:01:08, Fast shot of crowds in the train station and on the street (7) 00:01:09 – 00:01:23, Close up of a child raising the national flag, wide shot,

close shot and medium shot of Kung Fu performance in a martial art academy

(8) 00:01:24 – 00:01:23, Shanghai city night view, shot of Elisa and her boyfriend riding a bicycle

(9) 00:01:24 – 00:01:41, Sun Feng working outside a modern building, an old man counting money

(10) 00:01:42 – 00:01:46, Panoramic animation view

(11) 00:01:47 – 00:01:52, Close shot of a person shooting an arrow, Tai Chi performance at Shanghai Bund

(12) 00:01:53 – 00:01:59, Medium shot of a child playing on an uneven bar

(13) 00:02:01 – 00:02:06, Wide shot of an agricultural landscape, Pan shot of Jinmao Tower in Shanghai

(14) 00:02:07 – 00:02:14, Long shot of children at school, Wide shot of peasants working on the rice terrace, Medium shot of a girl practicing movement on a vault

(15) 00:02:15 – 00:02:26, Pan shot of the Great Wall 5.1.3 Sequence interpretation

Antiquity & tradition

The exposition sequence opens with a pan shot of the Great Wall from an eye-level camera position. In this wide shot (Appendix 10), we can see the mountains lying partly hidden by the sky and partly visible. The Wall extends far away towards the mountain. The whole picture creates a three- dimensional effect: the sky and mountains lie behind, the rocks are in the foreground lying on the x-plane, and the Wall is right on the z-plane. This establishing shot has a khaki colour tone, which triggers a sense of ancient and historical atmosphere. The green trees can hardly be seen in the background. The sky is a muted greyish blue. The wide-angle shot and the Great Wall in dark colours draw us into a country with a long history and many vicissitudes.

As for the sound track, this opening shot is accompanied by slow, rhythmic and melodic Chinese music played on a traditional Chinese string instrument. This music

is monotonous, resembling Ricci’s description of Chinese music in the seventeenth century. This type of music conveys a sense of the exotic, different, magic and mysterious, as it does not follow the familiar European harmonious orchestra system.

Therefore, even without a voice-over or a title on the screen, the audiences should be able to connect both the Wall and the music with the ancient Middle Kingdom.

The opening shot of the Wall is followed by the image of Shaolin monks improving their physical competence by beating water. The walking monks are holding a Buddhist ceremony in their red and yellow religious costumes. The inclusion of Shaolin monks in the film represents the long-standing Western interest in China’s ancient civilization, religion and cultural tradition in its historical context, as the history of the legendary Shaolin Temple dates back to the Tang dynasty two thousand years ago, and thus once again reminds us of Chinese antiquity. The selection of these images surely also reflects the increasing popularity of Chinese martial art films in the West. With Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, for example, mysterious Kung Fu techniques have been widely accepted and admired in the Western world.

All the bald monks in these shots perform Kung Fu with knives or swords in the courtyard of an ancient temple. In the background, we see that both the temple and pagodas have the typical Chinese architecture style of a flying roof, surrounded by bamboo plants. All the Kung Fu performers are wearing their traditional grey costumes, whilst senior officials at the Temple are dressed in red and yellow silk for the Buddhist ceremony. The surroundings and costumes in this montage deliver a signification of Chinese antiquity, and the traditions of enigmatic and mysterious oriental art. The action of the performance is processed with a slow motion effect to add a more artistic and other-worldly atmosphere to this montage in the film.

Some ancient architecture has been preserved intact to the present day in China, and so symbolizes Chinese antiquity. Along with the Great Wall, the Forbidden City is filmed in the opening exposition too. The camera pulls up from the marble fence to give a full shot of the palace, an unequalled monument to Chinese antiquity. As the

former royal residence of the Ming and Qing emperors, these buildings were forbidden to the public, and the palace appears in the film also to connote both mystery and the long-term imperial authority over the Chinese people.

Chinese calligraphy is performed by a man after the Forbidden City montage in the opening sequence. Historically speaking, Chinese characters were regarded as inscrutable, enigmatic and somewhat artistic, a writing system completely different from the Latin alphabet. These days, calligraphy work is more likely to be seen as an art-form than as writing. We see a stone quad decorated by red lanterns as a background setting. When the camera pulls back and zooms out, a man is shown bending over a long table to draw calligraphy work with a huge brush. The camera position then switches to an overhead angle, so we can clearly see ink and a slab laid on the left side of the screen. These “Chinese things” draw on the mythicized nature of Chinese art, and of course also refer to China’s antiquity and traditions.

So, from the very beginning of the documentary, images of the Great Wall, martial arts, the Forbidden City and calligraphy in the opening sequence guide the viewer into the ancient and mysterious oriental world of the old Middle Kingdom. The images used here in the exposition sequence to portray China remind us of similar descriptions provided by travellers, missionaries, diplomats and all others who have been to China.

China as threat

Once the audience has been brought into to the “country of antiquity”, the following images pull them back to the contemporary reality. As seen in Chapter 2, China in Western eyes is still a populous, threatening country. It is universally acknowledged that China is a huge land, the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion people, which accounts for one fifth of the world’s population. Aiming to emphasize the fact that China is a densely populated country, the image of this large populous nation is represented by a fast motion montage of crowded people in a train station and a busy street. In the eighties, the Chinese were compared to “blue

ants”, who wear the same uniforms and can hardly to be recognized. Here in this fast motion shot, we see an astonishing number of “faceless” people through the camera and cannot really tell the difference between individuals. The visual image of a large number of people is potentially “threatening”, and could remind the audiences of the Chinese as a “human sea”, as they were perceived in the 1950s and 1960s.

The large population size as a potential threat is further highlighted in the following scene of a Kung Fu performance at a martial art academy. In the full shot and close-up shot of the players, we can tell that they have already started to practice martial arts in this academy even though they are only teenagers, or even children. On the television screen, they all looked serious and devoted. Without the ancient architecture and costume setting as background, not even string music to accompany the images, the same Kung Fu performance here takes on a different connotation: that of a tool of military force employed by China to become the “next super power”. Even children are involved with this training to be policemen or soldiers in the future. A large crowd, when combined with martial art exercise, signifies that China could be a threat to the Western world, which is in accordance with the Western historical stereotype of China as an “awakening dragon shaking the world” and the Chinese as a “yellow peril threatening global security”.

An economic rise

As a matter of fact, in the new millennium, China has achieved astonishingly fast economic development. The fast motion of a busy street in the evening time in Shanghai, the scattering of grand skyscrapers shaping a modern city, support the narrator’s description of China as the world’s fastest growing economy. Since the economy is developing fast, the American value system would surely lead an American audience to assume that people’s lives should have improved. Thus, the director now takes us to a medium shot of the window-cleaner handing a hundred yuan²³⁰ to his father, who counts the money at once. The camera moves from a

230 A hundred yuan equals approximately 9 Euro in 2006.

close-up shot of the money to the father’s happily smiling face. Here the signification is clear: individual triumph aligned with the pursuit of material wealth.

The opening sequence continues with shots of individual people: a police woman, a business tycoon, and Mongols appear on the screen, as they will be the privileged and supporting characters interviewed in the subsequent body of the film. The storyline moves on to show a child athlete, representing China’s fight for the future.

In 2005, the preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games was an important priority for the Chinese government. A lot of construction for stadiums and properties was underway. In order to achieve this goal, child athletes had to sacrifice their childhood and undergo tough training for the Olympic competition. Chinese family traditions have been deeply affected by Confucian philosophy, which requires that children must obey their parents, and that individual interests should be sacrificed for a collective mission.

For a thousand years, Chinese notions of loyalty and duty have dictated that people must obey the orders of officials, and children must obey the will of their parents. In this exposition, when the narrator says “the price to pay for it”, a close up of a teenager girl playing on a parallel bar arouses our attention: frowning, her face expresses pain, and her arms seem to bear the weight of her whole body. Here, the combination of the image and words suggests that Chinese children have endured a lot of physical pain to compete in the big game. They have sacrificed their childhood to prepare for the “significant moment” of their country.

Another medium shot shows a little girl performing on top of a beam; she succeeds in completing a series of movements, but in the end she cannot keep her balance and almost falls off the beam. Her eyes are not staring at the camera, but rather keep looking down at the beam. At the end of this short montage, she is about to fall off the beam and her final unbalanced movement in this context is used to symbolize China’s “breakneck journey” towards fast economic development, leaving serious social problems in its wake.

Country of antiquity

At the end of the opening sequence, there is a shot of peasants working in the rice paddies, which echoes Pearl Buck’s novel and many other Western images of Chinese agricultural life. When the narration closes with the final sentence, “This is the story of people living in its heart”, the matching image is a medium shot of a peasant walking barefoot through a rice paddy, pulling an ox to plough the field. He is wearing a straw hat and ragged clothes and looking down towards the earth, so that the audience can hardly see his face. The man is bent over, showing the toll that the hard physical labour of farming has taken its toll. The conjunction of image and narration here implies that the people living in China’s “heart” are peasants; and indeed, agricultural labourers still account for three quarters of China’s whole population. In other words, China is still an agricultural country.

The decision to use a medium shot shifts the focus from the rich rice paddy to the actions of the peasants. Showing no evidence of modernized farming techniques, the peasants are using hoes and oxen to plough the field, suggesting that the primitive way of life in the Chinese countryside has not modernized along with rapid economic development. The primitive way of farming may have been chosen as it would be an appealing sight for a Western audience; the image of the traditional Chinese peasant who put his “hoe upon the shoulder and yoked the ox to plough”

would be familiar from Western literature, and would also stir the audience’s sympathy for these poor people.

China remained an agricultural country in the 1950s, as is mirrored in the natural primitive landscape in the sequence. The ancient land of the Middle Kingdom was considered as fertile and fruitful for a very long time; but since the eighteenth century, the general image of China has shifted from a fabulous fairyland to a primitive farmland. In the second half of the nineteenth century, while capitalism developed in most European countries, Chinese society was under the rule of the Qing emperors.

While the standard of living in Europe improved enormously in Europe, most Chinese still depended on their farmlands for a living and suffered from poverty.

Chinese peasants thus became the representative group of Chinese people to some extent, and their daily life has long been seen in the West as being the epitome of Chinese society.

Country of transition

To provide a contrast with the primitive image of rural China, shots of a modern city were added immediately afterwards. In the first second, the audience’s eyes are invited to dwell on the rich, unique and natural green rice paddy in front of the mountains, then in the next second, the montage cuts to a magnificent modern city night view. The run time of this modern view shot is short; the camera pans from one skyscraper to another in two seconds. To the centre of the frame stands the Jin Mao tower²³¹ in a medium shot, and several other skyscrapers can be seen in the background on the right.

All the buildings looked shiny and glamorous with bright colours, and the city bears a marked resemblance to the night views of other first-ranking metropolises such as New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc. Skyscrapers first appeared in the nineteenth century in America; the earliest skyscrapers were built in Chicago and New York.

Due to the rising status and economic boom in the States, skyscrapers began to be regarded as an icon of a modern city. This image flow between China’s primitive beauty and skyline construction emphasizes that China is in a period of transition and undergoing an enormous economic transformation. This sharp and striking contrast between a backward farming land and an advanced city supports the narrator’s remark that this would be “the story of the greatest transformation on earth”²³².

Exploration: reality behind the Great Wall

231 Jinmao Tower is located in the Lujiazui area of Pudong District of the Shanghai city. Until 2007 it was the tallest building in the PRC, the fifth tallest in the world by roof height and the seventh tallest by pinnacle height.

232 Quoted from the narration of the opening sequence of China Revealed

The exposition ends with the same signifier with which it began - the Great Wall - but shown from a different camera angle and position. The Wall is filmed in an aerial shot at the end, giving us an astonishing panoramic view from the sky so that the Wall on the screen looks like a stretching dragon clinging to the mountain. The winding line of the Wall creates a resonance among spectators with the notion of an old and continuous Chinese civilization. The Great Wall, however, seems a lot smaller, more vulnerable and insignificant in this bird’s eye shot. Then the montage cuts to a pan shot of a guard tower on top of a mountain peak. The camera moves in pan and follows this tower from left to right until it fades out of the frame. Apart from cinematic significations of different camera angles, this panoramic technique is frequently used in Discovery Channel documentaries to increase the attraction and visual delight of the audience, by taking shots that could not be reproduced easily by a tourist camera, thus making the view more magnificent and exciting. Thus, we can see here how a visual effect can at once function as a “selling point” to attract an audience and also as a signifier of cultural preconceptions or thematic aims.

Colour is skillfully used here, so that the Wall marks the separation between the mountain and the sky in the background. The yellow of the Wall is lighter than in the first shot, whereas the mountains are in a cold colour tone (green) and sky is azure without white clouds. The faded yellow connotes a sense of ancient history, whilst the bright green and blue suggest confidence toward a promising future.

Arguably, the use of colour in the shot also reveals the Wall as a symbolic icon of a curtain or barrier in the way of the mutual communication. The corresponding narration for this second image of the Great Wall is “This is the story of life behind the Great Wall”²³³, and thus, we are led to see the Wall as a communication barrier preventing the West from discovering the country and its people. The main theme of this documentary is thus the story of real life behind the Wall. The film-maker leads the audience across the Great Wall with the camera, so that the real story about the life of people living in China will finally be revealed in this documentary. Briefly, these three shots of the Great Wall and the narrative words succeed in delivering the

233 Quoted from the narration of the opening sequence of China Revealed