Night in the Lens

Chinese Cinema Looks at Ethnic Minorities

There is a strong temptation on the part of those from outside of China to either think of it as a monoethnic mass or to go the other way, to narrow focus onto its ethnic minorities as an antidote to the vastness of the country and wide reach of Han hegemony. Just as orientalism isn’t only a zero-sum game between the West and the East (in spite of what any correspondence-student of Edward Said – and they are legion – will argue), but can just as easily exist across and within Asian societies, so too does that desire to bypass the flawed and simplified notion of homogeneous China and fixate on minority cultures exist among Han Chinese themselves. In visual culture this can be positive, celebrating difference and valuing cultural diversity. But more often than not, it’s used to cement satisfaction in the Han audience with their own dominance, and also to create an image of an untroubled coexistence, one lacking in history, humanness, and changing political implications. Read the rest of this entry »

India / 1985 / Malayalam & Tamil

Directed by Govindan Aravindan

With Bharath Gopi, Smita Patil, Sreenivasan

In a Bhojpuri folk song, sung throughout the diaspora (in Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji, and elsewhere), two swans, one male and one female, float on a pond. The pond, the lyrics go, cannot be considered beautiful without a lotus. This song, followed and documented over many years by ethnomusicologist Helen Myers, seems to be about family ties; the pond represents the wedding tent, and the lotus represents a sister-in-law and her importance to the ritual proceedings. But, like most folk songs, it can have other metaphors snaking away from the central image. Read the rest of this entry »