In “The ‘Revenge of History’: Collective Memories and Labor Protests in North-Eastern China” Ching Kwan Lee analyzes three cases of worker protests and their subsequent success or failure. Lee spoke with a southern Chinese worker about the labor protests and the woman described the situation of the displaced laborers as a “revenge of history” where “those who used to benefit most from the warmth of state socialism suffered most under the competition-driven market socialism” (220). The workers in the northeastern provinces had grown accustomed to the state socialist model, which allowed them to thrive in the “huge, self-sufficient, heavy industrial state enterprises” that operated in the region (Lee, 220). When China began to transition from …show more content…
The majority of the movie follows Song and Tang as they begin their cycle anew with Yuan Fengming, a sixteen-year-old boy looking for work in order to pay for schooling for his sister. Yuan pretends to be the nephew of Song as the three of them begin work at a coal mine; however, the situation grows more complicated as Song begins to have doubts about murdering Yuan while Tang grows angrier and more anxious with every delay in their …show more content…
Around the five-minute mark of the film there is a scene with Song, Tang, and what is later revealed to be one of their victims. After a short conversation where the man talks about being homesick and missing his child, Song and Tang proceed to kill him with their pickaxes. The mine boss is told that he died due to a cave-in, and Tang puts on a very public and convincing show of grief over his lost “brother,” demanding that the family be allowed to come say their final goodbyes. He is eventually “convinced” to take a settlement of thirty-thousand yuan and leave the mine with the cremated ashes of the dead man. Much later in the film, around the fifty-minute mark Yuan shows Song a photo of his family. Song then takes Tang aside and begins talking about how the photo of Yuan’s father bears a striking resemblance to the man they killed at the beginning of the film, and that they even share the same last name. Song seems convinced that Yuan Fengming is the son of the man they had previously killed, and his trepidation and doubt about their plan becomes more evident. As the film approaches the eighty-minute mark the three men are in the mine and the dialogue echoes the opening scene, with Tang asking Yuan if he is homesick. Instead of striking Yuan with his pickaxe, Tang delivers a blow to Song’s face and then proceeds to approach Yuan to kill him as
Rae Yang’s Memoir “Spider Eaters” is a poignant personal story of a girl growing up amidst the political upheaval during the establishment of People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong’s Communist leadership. Yang describes the fascinating journey of her life from her early years as the daughter of Chinese diplomats in Switzerland to a student in an elite middle school then a fanatic Red-guard and eventually a laborer in a pig farm. Her experiences through the revolution serve as an eye-opener and lead to her eventual disillusionment of the Communist revolution in China. There are many factors that contributed to her growing discontent with communism such as the anti-rightist movement which was an effort to rule out any criticism against the government, corruption and violence of the party leaders who abused their power and continued to exploit the peasants, the false claim of proletariat dictatorship used merely to eradicate bourgeoisie and further the interests of party members.
.... In the end, O-lan’s anger helped her stand up to Wang Lung. She grew more bold. In the end, when she died, Wang Lung wished that he had treated her better because he truly missed her presence.
A young socialist group was created by the name “Red Guards” are hunting down “capitalist-roaders” who are guilty of the “Four Olds” which is old customs, old habits, old thoughts, or old culture. This is shown when the village chef comes for Fugui to get rid of the puppets because everyone knows that they are part of the old culture and though the puppets remind Jiazhen of her son Yongqing, the family burns the puppets. The audience is shown that the Communist party has infiltrated people’s houses and propaganda is even in the marriage song between Fengxia and Erxi. It is known that by this time the Revolution is at it’s strongest. Education is depicted to not matter and that proves to cause a disaster as later in the film during Fengxia’s childbirth the doctors are all gone and only the students are left. It is noticed that these students are all young woman and the Communist party is trying to make gender roles equal for these young woman, however it is clear that since the doctors were the only ones educated to help this puts the death of Fengxia who dies of blood loss after giving birth to her son Mantou. Fengxia who is mute and considered back in China as a disability in Chinese culture as a “dishonor” since disabilities was considered that no doctor or nurse would that treat them, manly because they did not know how. This part in the film is symbolic to this part of China during that time as it shows both children, Youqing and Fengxia victims of the Communist Party polices. At the end, when Erxi buys a box full of young chicks for his son, which they decide to keep in the chest formerly used for the shadow puppet props. Implies the history of Puppetry in Chinese culture such as it was made for an emperor who had lost a loved one and so an Official made a shadow puppet of her and when presenting it to the emperor he was overjoyed that he could see his loved one again.
In Style Wars, one sees how social marginalization affected graffiti writers in 1970s and 1980s New York. Firstly, Style Wars chronicles how the city government employed racist policing and propaganda to criminalize writers of color. Secondly, the documentary shows that newspapers and TV networks unequally privileged writers of higher socioeconomic status through front-page and prime-time coverage. Thirdly, the film depicts graffiti writers who conformed to masculine norms as disproportionately visible throughout the city. Although many writers featured in Style Wars minimized barriers against making art, legal racism, classist media coverage, and interpersonal masculinity limited recognition for certain writers.
Ever since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the legitimacy of the revolution of which it was built upon has perennially been in question. For example, in a 1999 issue of the International Herald Tribune, a prestigious scholar claimed that all of China’s tragedies are ‘sustained by a mistaken belief in the correctness of the 1949 revolution’ and that the future progress of China depends on the recognition that the revolution was a failure. However, the CCP government was certainly not perfect and its most significant failures were its political failures such as the Anti-rightist movement and the Cultural Revolution and also economic failures such as the great leap forward. Millions of peoples were falsely accused and persecuted during the political movements of the Mao period as the CCP focused on class struggle instead of economic development during the period and tens of Millions of peoples died due to starvation as there were widespread food shortages during the great leap forward movement.
To achieve this goal, he crafts a stylized capitalistic society that inflicts grave injustices upon his protagonists. The avarice inherent to this society governs everyday life within Street Angel. Xiao Hong, for example, lives with adoptive parents so corrupted by greed that they prostitute their older daughter, Xiao Yun. In a transaction that reflects the inhumanity of higher-level capitalism, these parents sell Xiao Hong to a local gangster. By juxtaposing the implications of this sale with Xiao Hong’s exaggerated innocence, Yuan appeals to his audience’s emotions, stoking anger toward social values that could enable such barbaric exploitation of the poor. Yuan employs a similar juxtaposition later in Street Angel, when Wang visits a lawyer’s office in a skyscraper – an environment so divorced from his day-to-day realities that he remarks, “This is truly heaven.” Wang soon learns otherwise, when the lawyer rebuffs his naïve plea for assistance by coldly reciting his exorbitant fees. The lawyer’s emotionless greed – a callousness that represents capitalism at its worst – contrasts strikingly with Wang’s naïve purity, a quality betrayed by his awestruck expression while inside the skyscraper. Again, this juxtaposition encourages the film’s audience to sympathize with a proletarian victim and condemn the social values that enable his
Wang Lung starts off poor, but happy. While he is not satisfied with his place in life, especially compared to the seemingly mighty and rich House of Hwang, Wang Lung is pleased to have a wife, Olan. Olan helps him in the fields, in addition to all of her housework, and she bears him sons. With her help, Wang Lung becomes successful and rich. His displeasure in his place in life is evident with Olan; while he is pleased to have her as his wife, he is upset that he cannot afford to have a wife with bound feet. Although he is disappointed in Olan’s appearance, it does not truly affect him until he becomes rich, at which point he decides that she is too ugly and he must take another wife, against his father’s wishes.
The Communist programs of Russia and China both appealed to a wide range of audiences but they focused primarily on the working class, or also known as the proletariat class. First, the Chinese worked on creating a conscious working class, making sure that they understood how low they were on the social ladder so that discontent could form, fueling the revolution (“Communism in China”, 3...
First of all, the novel and film actually have different interpretations on Wu Wei, one of the most important ideas in Taoism. A simple way to think of the concept is to consider Wu Wei as non-action, which means do nothing against the world. In the original Taoism book, Wu Wei is often associated wit...
The Bad and The Beautiful (1952) and State and Main (2000) are films within films that unmask Hollywood Cinema as a dream factory and expose the grotesque, veneer hidden by the luxury of stars. The Bad and the Beautiful, directed by Vincent Minnelli, is a black and white film narrated in flashback form. The films theatrical nature requires more close-ups than wide-screen shots to capture the character’s psychological turmoil. For example, Fred and Jonathan’s car ride is captured in a close-up to signify their friendship; however their relationship deteriorates after Jonathan’s deceit. While the camera zooms out, Fred stands alone motionless. Here, Fred is captured from a distance at eye-level and he becomes ostracized by the film industry and
“Apocalypse Now” is a legendary war film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The film’s main theme is devastation, violence, and horror. In this film Coppola thoroughly scrutinized the main characters ideas, behavior, and emotions to depict the darkness and the horror of war. His goal was to make the audience part of the horror. He wanted the audience to have a tremendous impact on this film and he succeeded with the perfect use of sound and editing in the ending sequence of his film. I will demonstrate how Coppola exploits a wide array of sound and editing to create suspense, intensity, and anxiety in the sequence to affect the audience’s emotions, using diegetic ambient sound effects, non-diegetic music, voice over and four editing types.
The movie I decided to analyze for this course was American History X (1998), which stars Edward Norton. Though this movie isn’t widely known, it is one of the more interesting movies I have seen. It’s probably one of the best films that depict the Neo Nazi plague on American culture. The film takes place from the mid to late 1990’s during the Internet boom, and touches on subjects from affirmative action to Rodney King. One of the highlights of this movie that really relates to one of the key aspects of this course is the deterrence of capital punishment. Edward Norton’s portrayal as the grief stricken older brother who turns to racist ideologies and violence to cope with his fathers death, completely disregards the consequences of his actions as he brutally murders someone in front of his family for trying to steal his car. The unstable mentality that he developed after his father’s death really goes hand-to-hand specifically with Isaac Ehrlich’s study of capital punishment and deterrence. Although this movie is entirely fictional, a lot of the central themes (racism, crime punishment, gang pervasiveness, and one’s own vulnerability) are accurate representations of the very problems that essentially afflict us as a society.
... This essay critically analyses and examines the effect of Communism on the Chinese Society during the period of 1946-1964. The overall conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese Communist Party managed to defeat the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and achieve victory in the Civil War, in spite of alienation by the Soviet Union and opposition from the U.S. This was primarily because of the superior military strategy employed by the Communists and the economic and political reforms introduced by this party which brought more equality to the peasants in the form of land ownership and better public services. This increased China’s production and manufacturing, which not only boosted the country’s economy but also provided a more sustainable supply of food, goods and services for the Chinese people.
In the modern day era, we find in society a ubiquitous usage of technology that seems to be never ending and forever growing. Included with this notion, the broad subject of surveillance is of course included. Contemporary surveillance, or more specifically technological surveillance, has been described as ambiguous; meaning that it is often misunderstood or open to different interpretations. The representation of surveillance within popular culture has played an impacting role on how we as a society perceive it and this raises certain questions that may reflect back on to society. The 1998 film Enemy Of The State directed by Tony Scott, Starring Will Smith, Gene Hackman and Jon Voight is considered to be a ‘spy-thriller’ blockbuster. Its central themes explore a range of surveillance techniques and equipment and also provides some insights, no matter how realistic or unrealistic they may be, into the real life security organisation; The National Security Agency (NSA). Using this film as an example and analysing how these themes are represented will hopefully allow us to key these ideas back to modern surveillance theories and practices.
The award winning film, Chungking Express, is a tale of two stories told in sequence, each about a lovesick Hong Kong policeman contemplating his relationship with a woman. The movie is filmed in impressionistic splashes of motion and color, which are used to help the audience get a better sense of the time period. In particular, the mise-en-scene, especially the setting, stands out in separating the different stages of relationships that the two policemen find themselves in, but due to the setting being in the same place it also helps connect the two stories. The first story concerns Taiwan-born cop He Qiwu, also known as Cop 223. Qiwu's girlfriend May broke up with him on April 1 (April Fool's Day).