Ruan Lingyu - silent china
The Viennale has a special program showing the films of Ruan Lingyu, the Chinese silent-film actress, this year. I saw her film Shen Nu (The Goddess) tonight - the story of a prostitute of a heart of gold, unable to redeem her position or improve that of her child. Nothing too surprising there.
But it was silent - not "silent" like Metropolis or Phantom of the Opera, where there's an orchestra score, but silent as in "everyone in the audience has to cough every five minutes" silent. It was strangely uncomfortable in the beginning, and then as I got drawn into the story it mattered less, I started imagining sounds (the UBahn going by every ten minutes helped). But I finally understood those cinema scenes in Fellini movies (Amacord? Roma?) where the whole town is loudly supplying the soundtrack to the movie.
Sometimes I did miss the dialogue, though the missing or late subtitles in this case were even more annoying. It's kind of amazing though how much they assumed of their audience - an entire argument is all gestures and context and maybe one line written out, and yet there's little ambiguity as to what's going on. Granted the plot may be a liiittle bit constrained to the unsurprising, but it's more than that. It links back to the questions of communication and redundancy and sociality - I missed the dialogue because I felt there was a layer of (mostly cultural) information I wasn't getting, despite the fact I definitely understood the goal of the dialogues, i.e. the furthering of the plot. I probably wouldn't have been as interested in more complete dialogue if it had been set in my culture, where I would have understood (or been able to fill in) that information on my own, probably automatically, as the intended, original audiences did.
But it was silent - not "silent" like Metropolis or Phantom of the Opera, where there's an orchestra score, but silent as in "everyone in the audience has to cough every five minutes" silent. It was strangely uncomfortable in the beginning, and then as I got drawn into the story it mattered less, I started imagining sounds (the UBahn going by every ten minutes helped). But I finally understood those cinema scenes in Fellini movies (Amacord? Roma?) where the whole town is loudly supplying the soundtrack to the movie.
Sometimes I did miss the dialogue, though the missing or late subtitles in this case were even more annoying. It's kind of amazing though how much they assumed of their audience - an entire argument is all gestures and context and maybe one line written out, and yet there's little ambiguity as to what's going on. Granted the plot may be a liiittle bit constrained to the unsurprising, but it's more than that. It links back to the questions of communication and redundancy and sociality - I missed the dialogue because I felt there was a layer of (mostly cultural) information I wasn't getting, despite the fact I definitely understood the goal of the dialogues, i.e. the furthering of the plot. I probably wouldn't have been as interested in more complete dialogue if it had been set in my culture, where I would have understood (or been able to fill in) that information on my own, probably automatically, as the intended, original audiences did.
posted by stella at 11:30 PM
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