Aventurina King

The Chinese film Summer Palace raised quite a cloud of dust at the Cannes film festival.  It competed without the green light of the Chinese censorship bureau and back home, officials were quick to retaliate.  A group of correspondents reporting on the festival was sent back to China.  The director, Lou Ye, was banned from making films in the middle kingdom for five years.

All this news, of course, muffled the film in an aureole of hype.  It was yet another concrete manifestation of Chinese dictatorship and a particularly public one at that.

What was so threatening about the Summer Palace?  In Cannes, all the mediatic brouhaha suggested that the film was a romanced documentary of the 1989 Tian Anmen square massacre.

I saw the film last night at the Lincoln Center.  It is far from a feature on Tian Anmen.  Tian Anmen lasts ten minutes in the film, and those ten minutes are so confusing that both heads and tails of the event are buried in a marathon of fire, screams and impromptu gun shots.

I guess the montage accurately depicts the 1989 event from a Beida student's point of view: the exhilaration and then the panic of the unknown.  Summer Palace adeptly paints emotions and atmosphere--timid dance steps in a crowded club, cold evening rays caught on pirouetting feathers--but it doesn't do much more than that.  Throughout the whole movie, the camera is scotch-taped to a depressed (albeit gorgeous) college student.  We watch her run, cry and smoke imported cigarettes; most of the time we watch her make breathless love to the school's pretty boy.  They part ways.  He goes to Germany, she becomes more depressed.  He comes back, they meet, they don't like what little they see of each other and in the last shot, he is driving and purposefully ignores her slight figure on the side of the road. 

The skeletal story happens in the interstices of the film's self-indulgent visual orchestrations and the characters remain distant and incomprehensible throughout.

I recently made it through two chapters of Edward Said's "Orientalism."   

It was far from an enjoyable read (imagine treading through a swamp of five syllable words and one paragraph long sentences), but it still got the wheels turning so much so that I brought up Orientalism at conversations during two recent social events (one engagement party, one birthday brunch).
Simply put, the book mercilessly critiques 19th century Western writings on "the oriental."

Example: "The Arabian traveler is quite different from ourselves.  The labor of moving from place to place is a mere nuisance to him, he has no enjoyment in effort [as "we" do], and grumbles at hunger fatigue with all his might [as "we" do not].  You will never persuade the Oriental that, when you get off your camel, you can have any other wish than immediately to squat on a rug and take your rest, smoking and drinking.  Moreover the Arab is little impressed by scenery [but "we" are]." (Smith)

This racism can't come as much of a surprise given the colonial agenda of the author's nation.  What did surprise me though was the relevance of Orientalism to the present.  It seems that most of today's journalism covering "the east" hasn't evolved much from its 19th century counterpart.

Example, a recent NPR news story:

Aerobic, Not Erotic: China's Latest Fitness Fad
In a downtown Beijing apartment, a half-dozen, mostly young women are gyrating and undulating in a room full of floor-to-ceiling metal poles and mirrors.
The women, who work white-collar jobs, are dressed in high boots, hot pants and tight tops. They swing, swoop, shimmy on up - and slide on down.
In China, newly affluent citizens are spending more time and money in search of a higher quality of life. They are quick to catch on to the latest foreign fitness fads, from yoga to bungee jumping and ballroom dancing to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And the women at this school are all practitioners of the latest fitness fad to sweep China: pole dancing. Here, the activity seems to have escaped connotations of strippers and girlie bars, and is seen as just another way to keep fit - exotic, perhaps, but not erotic.

(rest at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7119220)

Aside from some serious fact checking issues (6 women in a small apartment = latest fitness fad to sweep China = all the women in China) the article is pretty blatantly ridiculing it's subject matter.  Wow, the entire population of Chinese women (not just the 6 students) actually think that pole-dancing is just an exercise, haven't they got a lot to learn from us.  No superpower is happy to witness the birth of another and a lot of today's "China coverage" is a US defense mechanism against a constantly bruised ego (first Iraq, then China). 

I know it's easy for me to point a finger.  The identification of a problem doesn't become an obsession, it's solving it that takes brain power.  How do you guard against writing biased articles on another country?  That's one I'm still trying to figure out.  All help welcomed.