The portrayal of "otherness" in King Kong and Piccadilly

Having recently watched King Kong, i was taken by the way in which it explores facets of the other and the portrayal of pacific cultures as primitive, uncivilized and in binary opposition to a Western, developed nation. The journey into uncharted territory is first devised by film producers with the intention of travelling to make an epic film in the East. They immediately envision and hold an expectation for finding something wild especially in the way the female character is instructed to scream into the camera purporting to see a beastly creature.

Ironically they do find a larger than life creature on remote Pacific islands. The portrayal of difference and the juxtaposition of the East and West set up a power dynamic. The sweeping long shots of the natives and their erratic framing as a group on camera present them as irrational, the gaze of the camera is very much from a eurocentric point of view. I immediately thought of Uncivilized a film I saw in a first year English course(which I've noticed other students have too), that portrayed in single shots the individuality of the Western individuals yet tended to group natives in collective shots displaying their ethnicity, their otherness. The West hold up the East as a spectacle shown in the way King Kong is brought as a specimen and displayed on stage. The spectators sitting in the audience, presents the artifice of the cinema, selfconsciously reminding the audience that this is only a show and mimics the real cinematic audience.

Part of the fascination with the East also resides on its ability to be a threat to Western civilisation impinging upon the known, the rational and everyday existence of Western humanity. In Piccadilly, when we first see Sho Sho dancing in the kitchen, she is shrouded in an air of seduction, yet she poses as a risk to the flow of kitchen management . Even the Chinese characters she writes is subversive and is suggestive of the threat from another linguistic system to a Western one. The yellow filter through which most of the film is projected, was interesting, in that I thought it contained a subliminal message about the threat posed to the West by the East. Yet unlike Kong, towards the end, of Piccadilly, I thought the film does instil some sympathy and pathos for the death of Jim. In King Kong, the a beast appears revered and worshipped in the East but when the travellers encounter him he is viewed as an otherworldly beast embodying sublime terror so much so Ann screams for many minutes on screen. Furthermore when Kong is carted into the Western world he erupts havoc and posits a threat to both public life, in the way the camera glides over the destruction of the city, and private life since Ann is plucked from the interior space. The Americans to whom King Kong poses a threat to, seem only interested in Kong as a beast and a subject of scientific investigation.

In many of the tutorials the issue of scale in cinema has been raised. This film is interesting in that it suggests the relativity of scale. Compared to human, Kong is proportioned to overpower the individual, scale is a point which contributes to his sublime qualities. Yet when Kong climbs the Empire State building his scale is undermined by man's great architectural structure. Indeed Kong assertion as a threat is corrected by their intelligence and plan by the city council to use Ann as bait perched upon the Empire state building, and planes, a testament to man's invention in conquering flight, to swoop around Kong. The last line of the film "the aeroplanes got it" suggest the ultimate power of a human and Western kind's ability to wield the machines of their design to correct the imbalance of power of beast and man.

Joseph Cornell's, 'Rose Hobart'

Joseph Cornell's 1936 surrealist film, Rose Hobart, dedicated to the star of East of Borneo was first shown as part of an art exhibition in which Dali is quoted as saying that it is as if Cornell had stolen the film from his unconscious. In its reliance on dream logic, repetition of images and music Cornell's film really echoed the famous 1928 surrealist film un chien andalou directed by Dali and written by Luis Buñuel. Commenting upon the associations of the moon with night, vision, the dream and the unconsicous, Dali's film features a notable scene of the moon interlaced by a woman having her left eye sliced horizontally by an unknown hand. Although perhaps not as shocking as un chien andalou, Cornell's layering of the repetitious music, deliberate slowing of the projection speed evokes the experience of one suspended in a dream state, encapsulating how one might cinematically represent the subconscious memory of the plethora of visual images we encounter in everyday life. As Victor Burgin's essay "the remembered cinema" suggests the repetition of images from cinema in our every consciousness or perhaps the scenes from East of Borneo in the montage such as when Rose Hobart moves towards the balcony enact what we may remember from popular media, they are fragments of images.

These carefully chosen, non linear sequence of images cut from the traditional jungle film, East of Borneo reflect mental process and the way memory, the consciousness and subconscious, carefully select images that we occasionally replay in our minds. Other moments in the film, when Cornell weaves in the image of people gazing up at the sky at the beginning of the film and then cuts to a clip from East of Borneo are akin to the distortions of one's own subjective experience in registering a particular memory. Slippages easily occur in the transition from the original text to the way we process visual information within the mental "interior", as Victor Burgin mentions in his article:


"These tend away from the causal linear progressions of secondary process thought towards the extremity of the dream - which, Freud emphasizes is to be understood not as a unitary narrative but as a fragmentary rebus....these residues are mental images." (Burgin, 14)

Box with image of Lauren Bacall

Bryan Frye's notion that the manner in which the screen of the film frames the actress, Rose Hobart is analogous to Cornell's boxes and can be contextualised within his penchant for making boxes dedicated to female actresses. Cornell seems to be seeking a dialogue between the actress for whom the work is intended and himself, the shots chosen inhabit a very active male voyeuristic gaze, particularly at the beginning as the camera moves so we see Rose lying on the bed, through a screen. The assemblage format of the film is almost like an archive of his obsession with Hobart, the clips for the piece carefully chosen by Cornell to evoke his creative idea for the film as a whole. As such his status as an isolated outsider artist, his insistence on the importance of childhood, is reminiscent of artists such as Henry Darger, who similarly through art sought to rearrange the world and recreate it from their perspective in a way thats very personal so much that we may never completely grasp the full resonance of its meaning.