“Film whose action, situated in the American West, is consistent with the atmosphere, the values, and the conditions of existence in the Far West between 1840 and 190.”
– Jean Mitry
Throughout the films that we had watched in this month, signs had widely been used, to assist the expression of message, for instance, in Snowpiercer (2013), the monochrome colour scheme of the tail (dusty green) and the front (off-white) car, had signified that two cars were all a part of the ‘eco-system’, there will never be an end without breaking the rule.
However, in the Singaporean film The Maid (2005), the situation became totally different, since it is a ‘ less-Hollywood’ film, a culturally specific film that related to the Chinese tradition, the Ghost Month (Taylor, 2014), audiences who had a Chinese culture could have a deeper engagement with it, whilst the rest cultural others, could have a better understanding on how the Filipina migrant-worker Rosa felt after she had violated those ‘rituals’. The filmmaker had formed the atmosphere of Ghost Month by first placing an opening credit to inform viewers, later gradually emphasize the importance of it in the Chinese mind by Buddhist monks, incenses and the food offering, where these elements belong to different Chinese religions, that the film intended to present how complex the Chinese traditions were, and the fundamental understanding of it toward foreign spectators.
Chinese temple scenes in the film opening . cr. The Maid
Besides, the film had also included certain Hollywood horror tropes to threaten (or entertain) the audiences, such jump scares that created by the contrast of space and creepy sound effects, the strange kid, and Rosa being trapped in the haunted house that lack of lights when the film was at climax, to help them sympathize how lonely being a migrant-worker was, as well as how distressing the protagonist was that she have to be extremely careful with those ‘taboos’ that she was entirely unaware of it.
On the other hand, horror film had reflected the social situation in places that we are living in by using extreme examples. According to Tudor (1997), an excellent horror film should be social context related, resonate with our social experiences, that was able to let us feel concern, tension, verisimilitude about characters in the story. For The Maid, the weaknesses of foreign worker, especially migrant domestic helper in our society had been implied, of how tough a worker from the Third World were in order to survive in a developed place like Singapore, Hong Kong, or even Australia, including the huge cultural difference, the social unfamiliarity, and also a high working hours but a much lower salary than the local workforce instead.
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References
Altman, R. (1984). A semantic/syntactic approach to film genre. Cinema Journal, Xxiii (3), 6-18.
Taylor, J. (2014). “Legend Has It … ”: Imag(in)ing the Ethnographic Encounter in The Grudge and The Maid. Visual Anthropology, 27(1-2), 117-137.
Tudor, A. (2002).“Why horror? The peculiar pleasures of a popular genre.” In Horror: The Film Reader, edited by Jancovich,M., 47-55.
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