Raise The Red Lantern: Challenges Of A Concubine Joined The Household

Analysis: Raise the Red Lantern Student’s Name Institution Date Raise the Red Lantern Raise the Red Lantern depicts the challenges of a concubine that just joined the household of a wealthy family in northern China. Set during the 1920s, the film is mainly concerned with the status of women within the traditional Chinese society. It also highlights the extent of the circumstances portrayed in the film that reflect more significant political and social issues (Neo, 2004). The paper will focus on analyzing the various technical components of the movie, including the camera movement, the lighting, characters, editing and also the literary elements used. Also, it will connect all these elements with Chinese culture during this period. Additionally, all these contribute towards the creation of a tense tone for the film and express the movie’s themes of the consequences of repression and secrecy. Analysis In the film, the lighting is mainly influenced by the director’s application of intense and highly over-saturated colors. The colors in the movie serve as symbols and also are essential for aesthetics throughout the film. The color red, for instance, has numerous meanings as the movie progresses and power can be associated with this color. There is a significant power struggle between the wives as they intentionally make decisions to violently assault other concubines with the reward being the red lanterns (Lu, & Lu, 1997).Most scenes in the film are tinged continuously with either or blue or red colors and contribute significantly to the tone of the film. Colors are utilized to separate the concubines from each other. The main character Songlian wavers between numerous colors as she switches various color themes when she analyses which concubine is the most successful at winning the attention of their master. When this becomes irrelevant, she is continuously shown in black, and this represents her color and her resigned acceptance of fate (Kinkley, 2014). The editing of the entire film enables the events to flow naturally despite covering numerous scenes within an extended period. The story is divided into part whereby the editor utilizes a screen with text to transition from one season to another. Most of the scenes in the film are also intercut with shots of the scene from along distance. As a result, such a scene has additional coverage as the editor successfully portrays a similar scene from numerous angles (Lu, & Lu, 1997). This can also be a representation of how each of the women has their perspective on the same event. This highlights the theme of secrecy and shows how essential it was for the women to have secrets which cannot be quickly revealed. The editing is mostly applied to the audience to have a better comprehension of the film. The tone of the film is set by adding a traditional Chinese music score and also diverse sounds within the film. This can be viewed when Songlian initially enters the property, and every sound is sharp and crisp. This portrays how aware she was towards her new surroundings, and the audience also comprehends her sensitivity to her new environment (Serpytyte, 2013). The sounds also represent the emotions of the concubines as they attempt and succeed or fail in their challenge of pleasing a man that none of them cares for deeply. In the film, the rhythmic rattling sounds made by the foot massage are profoundly soothing, especially for the chosen concubine. However, this also alternatively represents the failures of the concubines. The constant rhythms of percussions increase the daily tensions between the concubines. Such sounds portrayed in the film highlight the psychological toll this had on the women since all decisions were made by their masters (Lu, & Lu, 1997). The film also applies visual parallelism which attempts at uniting two events, Characters and events together within the consciousness of the viewer. Such a technique provides the audience with a visible link between the images (Kinkley, 2014). In Raise the Red Lantern, the director utilizes parallelism which acts as a link between characters and also towards the scenes. An example of this is whereby Songlian is typically shot directly from the front of her face and shou...