In the Heat of the Sun is a film I recently watched and am inspired by it a lot. It is an old Chinese film shoot in 1994. It tells the story of a group of teenagers in cultural revolution in China from 1960s to 1970s. After I watched this film, few words just jump into my mind, time, diachronic, beautiful, clean, sunny, funny, bright, visual feast, exquisite… The cinematography and shots construction are the things I admire and want to learn from.

Here are the several scenes I select from the film and I will analysis their cinematography and shots constructions. I can’t download the film, so I can’t cut the scenes. I will provide the time period and the whole film at the end. (I found the film on Youtube)

12:20-14:50

In this scene, Xiaobing(the boy, leading character) makes a key by himself and opens his parents’ draw, he finds a condom there, but he doesn’t know it’s a condom, he thinks it’s a balloon or something then he blows it and plays it around.

In this scene there are lots of tight framing where the ‘balloon’ flies around all over the apartment, audience can see the whole perspective of the apartment, the wedding picture of his parents, the handiwork displayed in the apartment. All of those things appear in the framing show the style and social appearance of China at that time. I just want to say that it looks so real and stylish. also there is one shoot where Xiaobing is opening the lock on the draw, once he opened it, camera pan and tilt up immediately and become stable when the framing is planform of the all of the stuff in the draw, then followed by a over-shoulder shot of Xiaobing. This shot is so dynamic and shows the most of Xiaobing’s curiosity.

31:49-33:06

In this scene, Xiaobing makes another key and get into a girl’s apartment. But he doesn’t expect that the girl comes home suddenly, so he hides under the bed and watches the girl changing clothes. The framing is from Xiaobing’s position of view, so we can only see the girl’s half legs. But we can still see some parts of her from the mirror. I really like the direction here, even though we can only see some part of the girl, but we are curious as Xiaobing. From her body language, I think that she is a really beautiful, cute and young girl, she must love smiling and has a good personality.

46:42-50:13

In this scene, Xiaojun run into the girl he likes and he goes up and talks to her. I really like the shoot construction when the girls walks pass by Xiaobing. I have some pictures blew will show it.

The location is very well chosen, as we can see from the pictures, they are walking through a path surrounded by tall green trees. There is also a short wall on the other side. It feels like a summer afternoon with a very gentle breeze. Everything is so bright and beautiful.It’s like palpitating… They are talking on this path, they walk, stop, she walks, he chases, she stops again and call him, he goes up again… The subtle relationship between them starts building…

1:40:47-1:43:00

In this scene, there is one extreme close-up and tilt-up shot of the girl’s body, she is wearing a red tight swimming suit. Again it is from the visual position of view of Xiaojun. This shot comes out really great, it reflect the psychology of the youth in not so open-minded environment. They are curious, palpitating, wondering, happy, blundering, violent, immature, sad, uneducated, arrogant…they want to try something out, experience different stuff. But all of this is beautiful.

2:00:25-2:03:36

This is the last scene in the film which I like the most. In this scene, Xiaojun who can’t swim goes up to the highest diving tower and jumps into the swimming pool. He tries a lot. When he is climbing the stairs, camera shoot from lots of angles, those special angles makes audience feel the scare and confusion deep in Xiaojun’s heart.

The film