The director for Up the Yangtze has used an excellent narration technique that shows the subject through several different perspectives. We see the reaction towards the flooding process and the building of the Three Gorges Dam from villagers, teenagers, supporters, opposers, and even western tourists.
The story is mostly centered on Cindy who comes from a very poor family whose main source of income is from farming along the Yangtze river. This provides the audience with the perspective of the very poor or lower class. To contrast that, Jerry is a city boy who comes from a rather well-off middle class family. Both their behavior and work ethics are shown to the audience and one can say that Jerry is the spoilt child and Cindy is the one who is grateful she has the opportunity to work and earn some money to help support herself despite the tough and unfamiliar working environment. This gives the audience a perspective of the lives of teenagers who are living in the community affected by the Three Gorges Dam project.
The director also provided other perspectives such as a shop owner in a village along the river who is deeply saddened and worried about his welfare being affected by the flooding. He also expressed his disappointment with the violent treatment the villagers received from government officials just because they demanded for their compensation be paid to them. Towards the end of the documentary, another villager expresses his support for the government and how he believes that China is advancing rapidly. These contrasting perspectives once again provides the viewer with a much broader idea about the situation.
Lastly, the director did not fail to include outsiders' perspectives on China and the Three Gorges Dam. He did this by showing clips of interviews with tourists on board the river cruise ships. Most of the western tourists see China as a rapidly developing country but they seem to have failed to see the poorer side of China.
With the entire presentation of the documentary revolving around the perspectives of so many different people, the director effectively gives the audience a very broad view of China and lets the audience judge for themselves the severity of the negative effects from the country's rapid development.
With Up the Yangtze and Asch’s, In Search of America, both readers see the perspective of the poor sharecropper in their respective countries. In Asch’s story the sharecroppers and farmers he encounters are mostly across the middle of America while in, Up the Yangtze Cindy's family is a poor farming family. Something to note though is that while the farming families are poor in both stories Cindy's family is currently poor and the families from Asch's story are from 1937.
ReplyDeleteI agree that in Up The Yangtze the writer does a good job of showing the different perspectives however I would've liked more involvement of chinese government officials because the film shows a gap or sense of disconnect between the government and lower class of society. This is shown when Cindy's father expresses to the camera in a helpless tone that certain issues such as the dam are for "higher officials".
The chinese government and American governments both have poor sharecroppers but in Up the Yangtze the poor sharecroppers is portrayed with much less rights and seen almost as less human. Both stories show great intrest in helping to show the reader the struggles faced and expose unfortunate realities.