DISORIENTATED
The film ‘Father’ showed the story of the father of the film maker Cao Fei, a Chinese sculptor who is producing statues of traditional Chinese heroes, which are exhibited in public spaces. The sculptor was part of the propaganda machine of the communist regime and is still an official sculptor for the government. In this film he was working on a statue of politician and reformer Deng Xiaoping, to honour his great achievements, especially during the Baise Uprising of 1929. The contrast between the propagandaous aim of the old days and the commercial one of modern days of his work are immense though. The film shows how the statues, thereby symbolising a wider variety of Chinese governmental projects and Chinese culture, are now used to attract tourist and do not have anything to do with politic or social aims any more, painfully illustrated by one of the spectators in a little village: “This boy doesn’t even know who Deng Xiaoping is. If you use the money necessary to make this statue to educate him, he will know who he is.”
The disorientated feeling this film and the others left in me is one of a hyper superficial culture where ideology has been traded in for money, hierarchical structures are embarrassing, aesthetics are completely denied and identity is lost, all without any regrets or discontent. But off course there is the work of these new artists that by showing it is revealing a resistance against this culture. That would have been the message of this festival if it wasn’t for that last film.
THE SOUND OF TRANSLATION
‘Sound of Genesis’ by the artist Tu Zeng shows the reading of the first chapter of the bible by people from lots of different countries. They don’t read a normal English one, or one in their own language, but one that has been especially made for this film: phonetic English had been translated in similar sounds of phonetic Chinese. This had been translated in formal Chinese and the English translation of this Chinese version was shown as subtitles on the screen, resulting in phrases like “Taiwan is blue” where the original phrase had been “and God said.” The film questions the possibility and effects of translation and communication. The artist focuses on “dillusion, misunderstanding and (dis)connections, while searching for touching a Truth, a real and direct contact with the essence of the world.”*
This theme was leading for the panel discussion. It focussed on the image of China that lives in the Western world (and vice versa) and the role of the Western media in this. The claim is that the Western media is mainly showing the negative side of China and that this is due to a political and ideological agenda of these media (and off course the selling figures of this sort of news). A similar message is to be read in June’s NewAfrican, which makes it naive to simply wave this claim away. But then, what does this claim state? Where does it origin from? Is it something we can or must prevent? And what does this all say about the future of the media?
CONFRONTATION OF CULTURES
Are media capable of bringing news objectively? Who is to judge an interpretation to be objective? I think there are two different problems here. The first being that cultures interpreting other cultures do that from out other values and secondly that media are traditionally dominated by institutions with close relations to politics etc.. To address the first problem I think we can say that it is quite obvious this leads to interpretations that differ from locals interpretations of their own culture. Even if I would make my interpretation without any mediation, meaning to visit that country in person, I would still use my own culture and mindset to value what I see. Is this subjectivity a problem? Yes, it can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts, but I think it can also be the fundament of cultural exchange and thereby enrichment. The biggest difficulty is to reletavize your own perspective and take others serious. It is then the power of translation (what is lost and what is added) that Zeng emphasized which forms a new ‘language’ within the interaction. Hereby a problem that occurs within a globalizing world, or any form of meeting cultures can result in both negative and positve developments.
MEDIA AND POWER
The other facet of the problem is more difficult and complex. Media are not global, but local based and serve the interest of a specific group of people. Traditionally the opinion of the people is formed by the voice of the media and that voice speaks with an idealogical tongue. Media within one region may be diverse, but there is an underlying force that binds most through a ‘national’ interest. This characteristic of media land may origin in the same confrontation of different cultures, but is now instrumental in structures of power and is thereby institutionalized. The question is then if this media system is still fit to a more and more globalizing world. I think not and I think that is one of the reasons why more and more private media channels like youtube and blogs are becoming popular. These offer a posibility to avoid the ‘ready made’ interpretation, at least to some degree of institutionalization, and give a better possibility for the cultural exchange as formulated in the foregoing. A key factor here is, as we have formulated before, dependency or interdependency.
