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.