King Kong

It’s been made very clear to us all (“us” being the general Arts population) that images in film, television and other media of the past and present can inform us on the acceptability of certain attitudes and how they are developed. I approached King Kong in the same fashion, viewing carefully with its pseudo-ethnographic nature, often overlooking it as a piece of cinema. However, thinking about King Kong under the light of Cinematic Modernism, I felt I was seeing something new.

I find our interpretations of images to be quite explicit: for instance, that Kong is representative of the other, and translates many associated feelings with the other. This, however, could be communicated through many texts, not film alone. I feel that film is often examined as evidence for racist attitudes, rather than a medium in which racism has been communicated specifically through cinematic means. What I started thinking about in watching King Kong was how I could identify how the film communicates racist ideals through cinema exclusively. The treatment of a group in film is not through narrative means alone, but also through the camera.

The filmmakers, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, utilised the conventions of the medium to communicate otherness. What has been captured within the shot, strengthened by sound, is an image particular to cinema. Images depicting the tribes-people suggest homogeneity through depiction of the people in mass. The camera is typically situated some distance away from the people shown on film, depicting large crowds. The audience hears chanting often – singing on mass – also suggestive of homogeneity.

By contrast, white characters receive close-ups and shots which single them out, providing details of their appearance, particularly their faces. It made me think that this was as though an image of many non-white people was of equal value (or ability to hold the attention of the audience) to that of a single white person. The camera only comes close when examining the detail of a religious ritual.

When the camera sits further away from a scene (in particular the scene when the crew first sights the tribe), the audience sees the people as a distant cluster, making part of the scenery. In this scene, they are shown to be filmed by the filmmaker character, as though to emphasise this. The group make a scene, rather than a depiction of a group made up of people.

King Kong was remade in 1976 and again in 2005 – at this rate of remaking, it seems that King Kong has a “quality” that is continually relevant to cinema audiences. I’ve not seen the 1976 version, but I did see Peter Jackson’s 2005 version. I do not recall if the treatment of non-white people by the camera in the film resembled that of the 1933 version, but I do remember feeling enormously uncomfortable with what I was seeing. Obviously, the images of the original had taken affect, resonating in the remake made in the past few years.

I think that this shows King Kong is significant in looking at approaches to the other through cinema, I think that is representative of many films of the time and how depicting otherness was further developed in films of the future.