Medialogy

Having seen the last big budget film of Beijing filmmaker, Yimou Zhang (of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon fame), Red Cliff, I recognized the grammar-less fantastics of the Beijing Opening ceremony created with the advertised budget of 300 million USD (you have to wonder at this figure, the budget of Hollywood films are normally expanded and hyped to become part of the PR campaign itself, but in this case perhaps the figure represents real dollars spent). His films are characterized by the combination of astonishingly high production value (albeit strange value to American eyes, where you notice the fake beard in a scene with 5000 costumed extras), especially focusing on the maximal use of people with a looseness of narrative… both the motives between scenes and between the action cut loose… practically gibberish, in the sense that the scenes are clearly cut on the basis of pageantry, like a song-less musical, instead of narrative cause and effect. I watched his newest, Red Ridge, just a few weeks ago in Singapore, and the audience refreshingly laughed through the whole thing… a refreshing expression of cynicism in the repressive Singaporean culture, his films functioning as a sort of camp of money—a post-irony camp, un-moored from any retro reference, but simply maximal and consumerist and extremely Chinese.

This reminds me of Barthes... particularly his affection for the fake beards in Ivan the Terrible

A desperate western interpretation... Photoshop-Tricks of Humanism.

The opening ceremony of the games was similar, but molded on to a staged performance— really astonishing in its novelty… a special effects film production made to be performed live, not for an audience sitting in front watching a framed screen, but sitting above, hundreds of meters away. The fluid combination of media with performance showed the continuing trajectory of media art for the stage—a hugely expanded Blue Man Group, that has come so far from Laurie Anderson in spectacle to be almost unrecognizable as the same genre of performed media, combining the novelty of technology with illusionistic stage performance, reminiscent of late 1800′s stage magic.

The show ostensibly provided a science-center like chronological tour through Chinese history, beginning with reference to the recently unearthed primitive Fou drums (and also a clear lift from one of the Blue Man Group’s epitomal pieces… drums as colored light), through Chinese early history, dynasty by dynasty: courtiers, courtesans, through to a naive expo-like future of people made of energy and floating astronauts. Curiously absent was the communist revolution, but perhaps, as the only piece of history not relegated to a symbolic life—in fact the political structure promoting and housing all other symbols—it need not be represented (looking again at the images of the ceremony, I am struck by China’s lack of inhibitions against potentially fascist imagery… in the west, such a maximal transformation of the human in to the mechanical would be immediately criticized, and would work against our delusions of humanism).

Can these symbols even be pulled apart? I wonder at the comparison to both the typical American half time show, a similar array of disconnected spectacle that seems to wish to iterate, ‘America Now!’… a performance by a pop star, a marching band, a waving flag, fireworks display, some hip hop dancers, dancing girls… and to fascist pageantry: displaying a united national history as proud and linear and homogenous… a sort of techno-Riefenstahl). Certainly it points, in part, to China’s curious relationship with it’s own history… the of-empire history that was rebelled against now repackaged as the national identity of the people… it’s very Chinese. A presentation of history as linear and unifying instead of problematic would be considered severely naive now in the West— can you imagine anywhere in America but the smallest town, dressing up it’s performers in the costumes of Paul Revere and George Washington, Indians and Pilgrims, Fur Traders, and French Merchants to perform the identity of the American nation? And yet in China, as the underdog always proving its deserved importance to the world, this is a needed communication…

That is, this show was made for us, not for them.