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Media Project Write Up

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For my media project, I decided to focus on the critical theme of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as Sinophone cinema. While there are obvious Western influences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I stated that this film use of Chinese speaking actors who not all spoke Mandarin as their native tongue challenging the idea of what it means to be “Chinese”. In the film all the actors play characters in the Qing Dyansty, the last Dynasty of China before it became the current People’s Republic of China. As a result, all the actors in the film spoke Mandarin. However, the four main actors all spoke with different accents as they were all from different parts of the world (Chang Chen spoke with a Taiwanese accent, Chow with a Cantonese accent, Yeoh with a Malaysian accent, and Zhang Ziyi with a Beijing accent). This lead to the movie not doing well in China as many viewers could not get over the different accents and described the movie as “unauthentic”. This brought to attention what it truly meant to be “authentically Chinese”. I argue that there is no such thing as being “authentically Chinese” as that idea also holds that there is a “right” way of being Chinese. Crouching Tiger Hidden dragon truly explores just how vast the Sinophone is and in turn the many different ways people identify as Chinese. I used my media project to explore this idea by focusing on the three main actors in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi to visualize how different people from around the world represent China and the Sinophone in turn. I decided to have the base of my project be a map of China. On the map, I put the faces of the three actors in the areas they were born (Chow in Hong Kong, Ziyi in Beijing, and Yeoh off the map as she is from Malaysia). I then put a photo of the cities where they were born to show the different areas where these actors live to visualize how many different places Chinese speakers live and just how vast they are, sometimes going to different countries as is the case with Yeoh. I then chose to put photos of unique items to the specific regions to show that people who identify in the Sinophone do not all have the same shared experiences, and showing that one experience is not better or worse just simply different. I choose the writing of Mandarin and a propaganda poster form the Cultural Revolution for Ziyi as living in Beijing she speaks Mandarin and lives in PRC which is a direct result of the rule of Mao Zedong. For Chow, I choose to use the writing of Cantonese (the lingua franca of Hong Kong) as well as a photo of both the British and the Hong Kong flag clashing over Hong Kong showing the influences that the West, specifically England, had over Hong Kong and how that shaped the people living in it. For Yeoh I put the percentages of how many people speak Chinese dialects outside of China to show that even though Mandarin and Cantonese are the two dominant languages, that people still speak in local dialects with local accents under the Sinophone as they are not as well-known as the Mandarin and Cantonese majority. I then decided to blend a photo of the Visuality and Identity and a photo of the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon post to symbolize the interconnectivity of the two. This was meant to show how what the book talks about, the far reach of the Sinophone mixed with my argument of how this is accurately represented in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Through my media project I showed how far reaching the Sinophone was and through my college of photos over a map of China articulated how there is no clear cut “authentic Chinese” using Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as my vehicle.  
 

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