My Part in Summer Palace

For my part in the Summer Palace presentation, I focused on helping with writing the questions and also the most logical way and order to present them. Because I had written my response paper on indivualism in China, I was able to analyze the movie through that lens. There really is a lot of Western influence in the movie, and it is shown progressively. The students drink Western drinks and go to Western-style bars. The paper helped me better understand the characters and thus view them in a more sympathetic light. It was also possible to come up with answers to the questions in case we needed something to discuss and explain. Because I had been able to view the movie with the group in the library, I was also able to view the others' reactions to certain scenes in the movie, thus a short preview to how the class might act. Since we all had such different schedules, most of our group discussion for the presentation happened over e-mail.

We also had to pick out which scenes to show. Someone in the group came up with a list of the scenes, and I helped pick out which ones were the most important. During the presentation, I had the opportunity to direct what scenes should be shown and just how long each clip should be. While there were many sex scenes, a lot of the most important lines Yu Hong said came either right before or right after them. Without the context of the situation, we could hardly show the quotes that she had. Because the beginning had been cut out, I did a short synopsis of it in a WebCT post. We also had to summarize several parts of the movie that had to be skipped over, such as the conversation with Zhou and the girl in Berlin. It helped a lot that we had two days to do our presentation, because it would have been difficult to have the discussion since the majority of the class had not seen the movie.