Most people live in China.. at least on this Friday they do

Argh. It's 730am and I haven't begun my paper on the Norwegian film "Most People Live in China," or in Norwegian, "Folk flest bor i Kina." The Norwegian Film Institute has the best review of it that I've found. Essentially, as we were told in class, it is a "portmanteau" film, which is a word for a bag that opens to several compartments, or in Lewis Carroll's verbiage, a combination of two words to form a new word, like "smoke" and "fog" to make "smog", or "breakfast" and "lunch" to make "brunch." Urban Dictionary also says that it can also be a "cliche and uncreative way" to create new words, or even a word used only by Wikipedia that is essentially meaningless. The latter seems an unpopular interpretation (see definition #4).

None of these really seem to fit the film, as the film certainly seems anything but cliche, and I don't see how it is captured by the combination of several semiotic parts to create a new whole, in which both original parts create the new whole. Instead, there is a common link between all of the wholly separate stories, as in Four Rooms (with Tim Roth the bellhop).

My conclusion:

A critically thinking American watching the pawky Folk flest bor i Kina feels an acute sense of powerlessness: The rich octet of stories presented here shows a multi-faceted, complex people and their political counterparts or representations; Our own polity rings hollow in comparison and makes us feel more than a bit ashamed. Imagine for a second the American equivalent. We get two stories, one with a bright, kitschy blue, and the second a bright, mammon red. By laying the original two film stocks, both blue and red, upon one another, we see a busy, confused story in which we really can't make out a decent narrative, plot, or dramatic shape. The two stories, which really aren't that different at heart, have become some sort of avant-garde garble, much more Brakhage and Fischinger than Bunuel. The key here though is that when we lay the two on top of one another, the film stock has become somehow unerringly green. This may seem coincidental, but its not; our political story is all about an unintelligible narrative and script, and becomes a thickly obfuscated mess, the directors here simply concerned that they have enough mesmeric, blue and red mute print to keep their green-hued answer print as interminable as possible. At least this movie has a solution in Lasse. Even if we're blind and otherwise mundane, our dreams can ultimately save us.