Summary and reflection - Book Report/Review Example

Farewell My Concubine According to the of the thesis, the narrative of kaige’s farewell my concubine might blind the viewer to a more intimate associations of the films locations and themes.The director insists that the story is not epic, and it is a personal story about few individuals. The writer argues that the film shows how memories are fetish and re-articulated through intimate objects, bodily scars and importantly urban spaces that resist the myths of the Chinese nation-state. The author challenges the existing critical response that has mostly accused the film of presenting a patronizing national allegory.

The film, the author, argues, uses political challenges as a backdrop for the story of the locale whose inhabitants strive to retain an identity free from the state’s ideological manipulations. As such, it foreshadows the sixth generation filmmakers’ use of urban setting as spaces for personal memory.The tension between this different uses of memory is portrayed in two sequences that open farewell. They are the failure of recognition, the fickleness of the memory, the use of the reconnection as a stake in personal grievances and staging of these issues in theatrical spectacles.

The scene also links personal memories to larger historical narratives foreshadowing the films epic span of fifty-three years marked by key political events. According to the author, Critical discussion of the film has largely targeted the more heavily ideological issues. In particular, the construction of the national history and the performance of the queer desire sometimes mentioned in the breath. Through the reference to the urban landmarks representation of Beijing, farewell offsets the national narrative with a focus on the intimate spaces of the city and their past.

It presents a plotline that brings together the melodrama and the national historical narrative.Farewell does not show many recognized Beijing landmarks, but it captures the experience of the lived in the city. Although the film presents operatic and political spectacles, it gives more attention to an everyday aspect of day to day life in Beijing alleys. It uses visual and auditory clues to locate the plot and motivate the story line. For example, in a case in a point is the architectural symbolism that accesses the theme of overlap between operatic spectacle and the political struggles.

According to kaige’s testimony, the film allows the director to return to Beijing intimate space and his experience in growing up in the city that he associates with betrayal. Farewell thus is seen as kaige’s farewell to the town of his childhood. He used the film to reflect on his relationship with his father. He sets Beijing as a place of trauma. In many ways, the film addresses memory, the plot foreground exist of the unresolved mental trauma by constant reference to unhealed scars.Farewell can be considered among the Chinese urban films after the Cultural Revolution.

It lacks the rough edge of the Wang shuo’s plot and documentary-like realism of the later sixth generation. However, it demonstrates the significant link between grand production of the fifth generation filmmakers and the underrated pieces usually associated with urban cinema. Farewell is a product of post-Maoist ideology as it foregrounds the abuse of the stage for political means. Farewell is a rare proponent of Beijing as it promotes local and decentralized identity. It signals the beginning of a shift of emphases in nongovernment sponsored Chinese cinema.

Farewell portrays freedom and energy with which it plays. The story is ambitious using modern history of China as its theme, as the private lives of the characters portray their evolving fortunes. At one point, they are homeless, and it outcasts at another and nearly destroyed by their political naiveté more than once. The epic movies is a threatened art form at the films. The audience seems to prefer less ambitious and fewer drama stories in which the heroes control events instead of being challenged by the unfolding events.

“Farewell My Concubine” is an illustration of how a great epic film can function. I was familiar with the crucial landmarks in modern Chinese history, but this film helped me have the feeling and imagine what it was like to live in the country during those times. Like such dissimilar film as A Passage to India, this movie took me to another place and time and made it emotionally comprehensible. It is one of the best films.Work CitedBerry, Chris. Chinese films in focus. London: British Film Institute, 2003. pdf.