Africa’s Image on American and Chinese Screens: Case Study of ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Operation Red Sea’

Asian Journal of Media and Communication E-ISSN: 2579-6119, P-ISSN: 2579-6100 Volume 5, Number 2, December 2021 Africa’s Image on American and Chinese Screens: Case Study of ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Operation Red Sea’ Taling Tene Rodrigue Zhejiang Normal University Abstract. In the wave of industrialization and internationalization of the Chinese Film Industry, the Chinese blockbuster ‘Operation Red Sea’ burst out as the 2018’s revelation in terms of quality standards and visual effects. The movie starred a Chinese navy team, ‘Jiaolong’, made of eight highly-trained and well-armed commandos to protect overseas Chinese nationals, rescue hostages, and handle a terrorist organization involved in nuclear weapons’ deals. However, Africa is featured as the film’s background story, and warfare actions’ playground, displaying to the domestic and world audience the old made-up clichés of Africa blended with war, terrorism, piracy and desert. Meanwhile, in the same year, Hollywood released ‘Black Panther’, a blockbuster which as well featured Africa as the film’s background story and actions’ playground, but that surprisingly overturned Hollywood’s century-old tradition of picturing a dark Africa full of political turmoil, wars, famine, diseases and illegal migrations. It also downplayed Marvel’s obsession with ‘White Super-heroism’. With regards to these paradigms shifts, the article, through a comparative study of the two hits mentioned above, aims at highlighting the media portrayal of Africa on American and Chinese screens, digging out the motives behind Hollywood upturn on Africa’s narrative, and identifying possible solutions for the Chinese Film Industry to improve its experience of ‘African thematic movies’ while avoiding Hollywood’s past mistakes. Article Info Article History Received: 28 August 2021 Revised: 29 November 2021 Accepted: 20 December 2021 Keywords: Media portrayal of Africa, African thematic movies, Hollywood, Chinese film industry, Black Panther, Operation Red Sea. Copyright @2021 Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. (http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-sa/4.0/) 131 Volume 5, Number 2, December 2021, 131-150 1. Introduction In recent years, as China’s global status continues to rise, as its technology performances continue to progress, the Chinese films and digital works are developing rapidly and are gradually keeping the world’s attention. As matter of facts, new Chinese films are flocking movie theaters than ever before. In 2000, China released just 91 films. That number jumped nearly tenfold to 902 by 2018. In 2019, the Chinese box office raked in $9.3 billion, making China the second biggest player in the film industry after North America as shown on the figure below (Source: Motion Picture Association of America). Figure 1. Global Box Office Revenues 2011-2019 The Chinese government has clearly outlined growth targets for the Chinese Film Industry. At a national symposium held in February 2019, Wang Xiaohui, the director of China’s National Film Bureau, called on China to become a “strong film power” like the US by 2035 (Rebecca Davis, 2019). Determined to promote the Renaissance of Chinese civilization, the Chinese government in its new development’s strategies has prioritized the opening up through exchanges and cooperation with the outside world. That opening up strategy is noticeable in core foreign policies’ concepts such as “Sharing Economy”, “Community of Shared Future”, “Common Destiny” and so on. These concepts are gradually shaping the image of China as a great power and enhancing its cultural soft-power. Following 132 Taling Tene Rodrigue, Africa’s Image on American and Chinese Screens: Case Study of ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Operation Red Sea’ the same trend, the Chinese Film Industry has grown up central concepts and produced digital contents oriented towards “Patriotism”, “Great power”, “Humanitarianism”, etc. (Dongyao Nie, 2018). As the dynamics of the changing global geopolitics have driven China and African Countries more and more close, number of movies, documentaries and digital contents have emerged from the Chinese Films Industry, reflecting the global apprehension of Africa by Chinese filmmakers. These apprehensions have been materialized in a new wave of Chinese made “African Thematic Movies” (Rodrigue, Taling T., 2018). An “African Thematic Movie” is to be understood as a non-African made film themed on Africa or Africans. It is a movie which thematic is related to African realities as portrayed by people other than African themselves. Such movies cannot be counted as genuine African films despite they may use black actors and sometimes black directors. It is worth mentioning that, this category of films is recent in the Chinese mainland contrary to the Hong-Kong that was already influenced by earliest western-made African Thematic Movies since the 1980’s as pointed out by the Chinese scholar and movie director Zhang Yong. For him, the recent years’ improvement of China’s comprehensive national strength and the rapid development of the film industry have led some Chinese films to be shot directly in Africa, reconstructing African narratives and African cultural images, and so providing a new vision space for the Chinese audience. He further noticed that, due to the lack of narrative experience, the four (most influential) domestic films with African themes have been “unconsciously” influenced by the Hollywood-style African thematic movies, and thus reflect problems such as warlike plots, sceneries exaggeration, characters symbolization and cultural marginalization, shaping a completely different image reception at home and abroad (Zhang Yong, 2018). As result, from early Hong-Kong made “African Thematic Movies” such as ‘ Crazy Safari (Billy Chan, 1991)’, ‘ Crazy Hong Kong (Wellson Chin,1993)’, ‘ The gods Must Be Funny in China (1994, Dick Cho Kin-Nam)’, to the recent most prominent ones made on mainland China such as ‘Ultimate hero (2016, Ragon Chen,Sky Li)’, ‘ China’ Sales Man (Tanbing, 2017)’, ‘Wolf Warriors Ⅱ (Jason Wu, 2017)’, ‘Operation Red Sea (Dante Lam, 2018)’, one can easily perceived the resemblance and rapprochement between these movies and Western-made “African Thematic Movies” such as ‘ The Gods Must Be Crazy 1-2 (amie Uys, 1980, 1989)’, ‘Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001)’, ‘Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004)’, ‘Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2008)’, etc. where Africa is depicted as backdrop of all terrible things that could ever happened to mankind, and African characters always unfortunate and powerless. Such movies have contributed to shape a bias media portrayal of Africa to the world audience, and so, reinforcing the general mindsets and prejudices established even earlier on Africa by western media discourses (Rodrigue, Taling T., 2018). 133 Volume 5, Number 2, December 2021, 131-150 In fact, the 2018 Hollywood movie dir (...truncated)