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China Love
Oct. 13th, 2019 09:37 amThe 2019 Heartland Film Festival has begun! This year, I kicked off my viewing with China Love, a documentary about pre-wedding photography shoots in China. A few months before the wedding, many young couples in China have an extremely fancy photo shoot together. They get all dressed up in their wedding clothes (often with multiple changes of gowns and tuxedos) and get their photographs taken not only at local landmarks, but in photography studios that have set up all sorts of romantic dreamscape tableaux, so the couple can get their photo taken, say, embracing in a fairy tale forest, or kissing underwater.
It sounded analogous to an American engagement shoot to me, although much fancier, so it surprised me that the director seemed to think western viewers would find the practice so alien. However, she’s from Australia, perhaps engagement photo shoots are not yet rampant there.
Otherwise, I enjoyed the documentary. It’s arguing that these photographs are encapsulating a dream, not only for the young couple - perhaps not even primarily for the young couples - but also for their parents, many of whom got married during the Cultural Revolution, when even suggesting something as sumptuously capitalistic as a pre-wedding photoshoot would have gotten them in loads of trouble. Many of these older couples have only a single photograph to commemorate their weddings: a small black-and-white snapshot of the young couple in what look like normal street clothes.
So these expensive pre-wedding photography sessions aren’t just capitalist excess: they’re helping to heal a cultural wound. There’s a particularly fascinating section about a small volunteer organization that throws simple pre-wedding (well, actually decades-post-wedding) shoots for elderly couples, so they get to enjoy a little bit of the pomp and celebration they were not allowed to have when they got married.
Another twist on the pre-wedding photo shoot: the mother of one of the profiled brides threw a pre-wedding photo shoot for herself just a few years ago - even though obviously her own wedding was a long time before that, and she’s now divorced. She didn’t bother with a groom at all, just got shots of herself as the beautiful bride.
Isn’t that fascinating? Obviously a single documentary can’t cover everything, yet I wished that it had lingered on this phenomenon a little longer. Was this a very unusual thing for this woman to have done, or do lots of older divorced or widowed or single women have such pictures taken? What does it mean to get pre-wedding photos done when you’ve only got one half of a couple?
If nothing else, it suggests that my engagement-shoot analogy is perhaps more misleading than not, because I find it hard to imagine an American woman in a similar position getting a bunch of romantically beautiful photographs taken of herself and calling them an engagement shoot. An engagement photoshoot doesn’t have so much cultural meaning in America that you can utterly detach it from a wedding, but it seems that a pre-wedding shoot in China does.
It sounded analogous to an American engagement shoot to me, although much fancier, so it surprised me that the director seemed to think western viewers would find the practice so alien. However, she’s from Australia, perhaps engagement photo shoots are not yet rampant there.
Otherwise, I enjoyed the documentary. It’s arguing that these photographs are encapsulating a dream, not only for the young couple - perhaps not even primarily for the young couples - but also for their parents, many of whom got married during the Cultural Revolution, when even suggesting something as sumptuously capitalistic as a pre-wedding photoshoot would have gotten them in loads of trouble. Many of these older couples have only a single photograph to commemorate their weddings: a small black-and-white snapshot of the young couple in what look like normal street clothes.
So these expensive pre-wedding photography sessions aren’t just capitalist excess: they’re helping to heal a cultural wound. There’s a particularly fascinating section about a small volunteer organization that throws simple pre-wedding (well, actually decades-post-wedding) shoots for elderly couples, so they get to enjoy a little bit of the pomp and celebration they were not allowed to have when they got married.
Another twist on the pre-wedding photo shoot: the mother of one of the profiled brides threw a pre-wedding photo shoot for herself just a few years ago - even though obviously her own wedding was a long time before that, and she’s now divorced. She didn’t bother with a groom at all, just got shots of herself as the beautiful bride.
Isn’t that fascinating? Obviously a single documentary can’t cover everything, yet I wished that it had lingered on this phenomenon a little longer. Was this a very unusual thing for this woman to have done, or do lots of older divorced or widowed or single women have such pictures taken? What does it mean to get pre-wedding photos done when you’ve only got one half of a couple?
If nothing else, it suggests that my engagement-shoot analogy is perhaps more misleading than not, because I find it hard to imagine an American woman in a similar position getting a bunch of romantically beautiful photographs taken of herself and calling them an engagement shoot. An engagement photoshoot doesn’t have so much cultural meaning in America that you can utterly detach it from a wedding, but it seems that a pre-wedding shoot in China does.
