Mise-en-scene of Raise the Red Lantern and Women

When making a movie a director has a hundred different little choices to make.  Should line x be said a certain way, should the light point on her face like this or that.  Everything idea or item that helps create an image or series of images flashing across the movie screen is a result of one or more of those choices. Mise-en-scene is the term most often used for the construction of the scene.  A director is able to use the set, the lighting, the costuming and the thousand other aspects of the film to create meaning outside the narrative. Raise the Red Lantern is a stunning example of this.  This particular film addresses the inescapable position women and their obligations. The world of the wives in Raise the Red Lantern is oppressive and as mentioned previously wholly inescapable.

                Songlian enters her marriage with an expression of nothingness. She has no passion for the idea of marriage yet she is in a way forced to accept it.  She was an academic, yet she still makes the decision to marry a very rich man and become his fourth mistress.  Upon entering the compound she enters her massive new home. It is gigantic, to the point of being a monolithic prison.  The further into this ‘home’ she goes the further she gets from freedom.   The sheer size of her new home is one signifier of how inescapable her new life is.  We never see the master’s part of the house yet we get to see the wives rooms.  Each has what in modern America would qualify as a huge individual house. Songlian herself walks much of the compound and reveals that there are many places to disappear within its walls.  There are very few staff members so she remains alone for long periods of time, with no one else but one maid to push around.  She finds the third wife on the roof of the houses singing. She wonders around and finds the son of the master’s first wife playing his flute. She even finds the room where women have an infamous tradition of dying, and later watches as the third wife gets dragged into that room and is hung.

                She watches everything from distances. When she finds the third wife singing on the roof, she doesn’t approach her right away. She listens to her singing, trying to show herself to be not bothered by the disruptions to her solitude and her time with her new husband.  Later she watches from a balcony as the same wife dances and sings in her courtyard. When the man reveals who gets the visit from the master they each stand away at their door ways, and she is the furthest from the entrance. She and the master’s son watch each other from a distance.  Her prison keeps her distanced therefore from the world. She is solitary and alone, with no connection to the outside world, that could stand for freedom.  When the master first looks at Songlian he looks at her from a distance. He sits across the room from her. He tells her to lift one of the famous Red Lanterns and shine light on her face.

                Another testament to the instability she is obligated for survival to entertain the master.  Success in this venture was marked by the lanterns.  The red lanterns were only lit when that wife was chosen for a night with her husband. The entire compound without the lanterns is grey, even the weather is grey. The only other real color we get outside the rooms of the wives is the white snow. The color red is bright and very noticeable.  The lanterns glow painted everything red. Inside Songlian’s room and even the servant’s room the lights bath everything red. Then conversely when it comes to light that Songlian had faked her pregnancy the lanterns are covered with black bags.  Darkness falls over her part of the house.  Then after she’s gone mad and lit the lanterns in the deceased third wife’s she returns to her dull black and white outfit she arrived in. She is trapped by her own black and white nature. She is either in favor or out. The color in her world or lack of it literally translates to how bright a future, or how happy a time she can have. By lighting the lanterns at the home of the third wife she is showing that the wife is free from her prison. She may have lost her love but she has been given a proverbial way out.

                 The size of the compound, the distances at which the characters interact, and the colors of the film all illustrate that Songlian is trapped in a prison. She is oppressed by the sheer size of her home and the solitude of a life she did not really want to have.  She is continually faced with walls, dull colors and solitude to escape is impossible. The only option she has is to find the lights or find madness. For a time she finds the lights, but then when she loses the light she succumbs to madness.

Loyalty and it's Obligations By: Chelsea Callahan

It becomes very clear by examining the three films Fists of Fury, The Drunken Master, and A Better Tomorrow that the culture of Hong Kong, or at least the version of it that gave birth to these films is deeply rooted in the importance of loyalty and fulfilling obligations. Considering a single character in each film you can see that almost anything goes when it comes to remain loyal to one’s family and honor them. When wrong doing occurs then action becomes necessary out of obligation. The act of being loyal is defined as keeping someone’s trust and living up to the obligations they place on you.  Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat all take action in their aforementioned films to uphold this promise of loyalty because they have to. There exists no other choice for them. Each becomes violent in their own right but for the same reasons. They each elicit a different and character specific reaction from the audience but come from the same place.  As Cheng Chao-an in Fists of Fury Bruce Lee leaves his audience respecting his character. By living vicariously through him we can see that murders find the justice we wish the law would give them, but to keep all parties grounded in reality Cheng faces the consequences.  Chan’s character in The Drunken Master , Wong Fei-Hung, is by no real means similar to Cheng but he still is faced with the choice of being a spoiled child all his life or living up to his family’s honor. It is a true coming of age story, and we are only able to like him because of Chan’s comedy and the fact redemption is possible for him.  Mark played by Chow Yun Fat in A Better Tomorrow is entirely different from Cheng or Wong.  He begins his journey outside on the darker side of right and wrong. His brotherhood with his friend is one of few things that makes him worth paying attention to. Each man is redeemable because they remain loyal when tested and fulfill the obligations to that loyalty.
            Cheng Chao-an  during the beginning of Fists of Fury is a reformed young man. The viewer discovers that he has sworn never to fight again, on his honor in the name of his mother. It is important to him that he keeps this promise and remains loyal to his word. As a reminder of his promise he wears his mother’s locket to symbolize what he’s sworn to do.  Familial loyalty keeps him nonviolent because he is obligated to remain a reformed and upstanding young man. It’s expected of him as an adult.  A viewer might even believe that this is a reverse coming of age story if they were swayed away from liking Cheng as a character but he is redeemable. During his time with his cousins in becomes increasingly more difficult for him to keep his word. His family members are not held to the same standards as he is and one in particular even takes on a fight in front of him. Cheng struggles to not get involved.  However, when His cousins begin to disappear after going to meet with their Big Boss it becomes impossible for him to remain passive. Cheng steps into a fight and defends his family from the boss’s henchmen and then is unceremoniously thrust up as the leader of their quest to find out what really happened to his family. It is his newly acquired duty to lead the charge demanding answers.  This seems like another redeemable opportunity for this former bad boy, since to get there he has effectively broken his vow. Yet, Cheng is easily side tracked. The manager of the ice factory easily manipulates him, and Cheng’s naivety leads him astray from his ultimate goal. He makes some unsavory choices, drunk out of his mind but we know in that he must step up. It’s his obligation and he holds those in great importance. When he discovers what actually happened to his missing family members and learns that the rest of his cousins have been killed Cheng is faced with a choice. Do nothing or stand and fight. By doing nothing his loyalty is nonexistent so he must act. It is in his nature and he must avenge the dead or his family has lost its honor.  Not a single one of his cousins was spared so he must spare none in return and does exactly that.  On the screen we witness what truly happens when you live by the code, an eye for an eye.  He murders many thugs but still by the end of the film is arrested.  We know he has taken action and is redeemed because he has proven that not everyone in his family is so easy to kill. His love interest is alive, but he must also graciously accept that there are consequences for murder. To remain in this reality any action with so grand an effect as taking another life must have some consequence, and for Cheng it does.
            Wong Fei Hung in the Drunken Master played by Jackie Chan is quite different that Cheng as a person. This film is a coming of age story at its core going in the proper direction. From the very beginning Wong is a spoiled child of a martial arts teacher. He has attitude and doesn’t take well to authority. One of the first times we see him he ends up schooling his teacher, by making fun of him and proving that he knows more, and better. As a result of his foolishness Wong is to be forced to learn right and wrong from a very strict teacher. Therefore, hearing the scary tests he must endure and what’s coming for him he fights back by running away, as fast as he can from his obligations.  He doesn’t want to be a grown up, he presumably doesn’t care about his family’s honor and therefore just is out to protect himself.  It isn’t until his encounter with Thunder Leg and his utter humiliation at being beaten by the assassin that Wong realizes the importance of what his family is trying to teach him.  Still a bit rebellious he starts to commit to learn discipline from his teacher. He cheats a few times but each attempt at going against his obligation backfires on him. Even when he has finally learned and mastered the Drunken Gods kung fu, he’s taken a short cut and refused to learn and practice Mistress Ho’s style.  This too backfires on him. However he does what he must to finally beat Thunder Leg and is redeemed in the eyes of the viewer and his father.
            Both Cheng and Wong operate in the sphere of good people, though they don’t always make the right choices. When one considers Mark’s profession and attitudes at the beginning of A Better Tomorrow he is not in that same sphere. He’s the polar opposite of Cheng’s reformations, and is long past becoming an upstanding citizen like Wong.  However we are still able to find him likable. We find him cool, but why? He’s a mobster, he kills people without a second thought and falls from the grace he thought he had and becomes an all around bad person. Yet he does possess one redeeming quality and that is friendship with Ho. It is his brotherhood that keeps him from running away in the end like a coward. We can respect him for returning and killing as many of Ho’s enemies before he himself gets killed.
            All three men come from different places in life, different backgrounds, and different stations and yet they all have a common ground under the banner of loyalty and obligation.  It is because of this loyalty that even their worst offences can be forgiven by the viewer and we can be allowed to admire them or at least like them on a superficial level.  The cultural norm presented underneath all of these films is that maintaining loyalty and fulfilling obligation are the two most paramount things in one’s life. Without them you are nothing, you are the bad guy.