Documentary Video Analysis review Movie Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Documentary Video Analysis - Movie Review ExampleThe time was one of change magnitude curiosity ab egress China in the wider world, and this documentary was no doubt conceived as a commission of informing western audiences about the background to the unfolding protests in China. The main message of the film appears to be a to give a linear narrative starting with the end of the old feudal corpse and the beginning of a new struggle for control in China in the year 1911. The discern and neck battle between Nationalists and Communists is shown, with some quite graphic old black and white mournful pictures of what life, and in some cases death, was like for many people. Very early on at that place is an indication of the net goal of the documentary, which seems to be to rationalize to the viewer how China became the largest communist state on earth. The dramatic personal manner this is sad, and the deep, male American narrative voice, make this sound like something dramatic, an d at the same time pretty frightening. In point this pro-American tone is carried on throughout the whole documentary and constitutes something of a bias. entirely of the English language voices which are used to translate the passages in Chinese are very American, and it is an enkindle choice on the part of the director to use this kind of speaker and not seek out speakers with more international or Asian sounding voices. The film is very effective at transfer the struggle between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse Dong for the heart of the Chinese people. The trouble for the Western viewer is, however, that there does not seem to be much difference between the nationalist and the communist camps. Both go about their business with quite extreme brutality, making this quite a harrowing film to mark in places. Executions, piles of corpses in the streets, and tales of vicious torture bring home the atrocities carried out by both(prenominal) sides, and the human cost to the ordinary pe ople who made up both the armies and the victims of pillaging across a landscape that is already dreadfully poor. The film would have benefited from pause from visual narrative, in order to explain some of the ideological differences between the two. Mao is shown writing out some of his greatest works, for example, but there is no indication what it was he was writing about. The analysis of events was not at all sophisticated, and in fact some of the graphics were beyond basic. For a production in the late 1980s, it shows remarkably little sophistication in the maps and visual effects that it uses. Arrows and flags denote troop movements and foreign country involvement, but it is all do on a scale that makes china look like a tiny marginal state. in that respect is no impression of the vastness of the territory, or the great differences in terrain and culture that existed across this whole nation. The silk hat features of the film were a) its use of authentic old silent films, a nd b) its interviews with eye-witnesses who knew some of the leading figures in China in this period. The son of Chiang Kai-shek is interviewed, for example, presenting a disconcertingly western appearance in his shirt and tie, along with many soldiers and a few women who were involved in the Long March or in some of the Communist or Nationalist youth movements. Several of these interviewees give remarkable testimony to the dangers that they themselves faced, and several pronounce