Analysis of the Role of Sound in the Construction of Oriental Aesthetics in the Film "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains"

Abstract

"Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains”, known as Gu Xiaogang's debut film, was screened at the closing ceremony of La Semaine de la critique at the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival and received a lot of attention. Charles Tesson, in the pre-screening introduction, compared the film to Edward Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day" and said it was a "Chinese film like you've never seen before". The film told a story of an elderly mother who unexpectedly experienced a stroke and lost her mind on her birthday party, leaving four families to face the test of love and reality. From a quiet daily scene, the film contained so considerable information including the splendid land, dilemma and changes of time, reflecting the authenticity of the life in China in contemporary time. Inspired by the famous painting "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains", the film narrated the story in a chronological order of four seasons and merged the traditional Chinese paintings' concept with the light and shadow. The movie is the modern version of the painting's landscape brought to life, where the changing seasons are interwoven with human lives. The whole film presents real Chinese family relationship with the help of scrolling picture and changing scenes around based on the cavalier perspective theory in Chinese painting. The vicissitudes of life and all the odds and ends are indeed poetry depicting human life in an extraordinary period where a nobody can do nothing but sigh after having been through a lot. The sound, acting as an important component of audio-visual language, contributes a lot to the oriental aesthetics with its unique characteristics.