Documentary-filming tends to take the following forms:
(a) film in sync(hronisation), with picture and sound lined up;
(b) take mute shots (picture only, no sound);
(c) record sounds off-camera, to be used as background fillers (for mute shots).
On one of the film shoots for an episode in the Heart of the Dragon, the crew was filming in the home of a woman in Nanjing accused of burgling her neighbours’ flats. The TV had been left on while the filming was taking place, which included interviewing the woman and her husband (done in sync). Then the cameraman went off to do mute shots, while the sound recordist went off to do his off-camera recording.
Back in London, the film editor (who didn’t know any Chinese at all) managed to match the wrong sounds and images.
Throughout the time the film crew was in the flat, two TV programmes were running: one was an American cowboy film, the other was a wildlife documentary about butterflies. The editor chose the image from the cowboy film because she thought it was so interesting that they should be showing spaghetti westerns on Chinese TV (this was 1983), but it was a mute shot, so she had to go and get some sounds for it. Unfortunately, she chose the off-camera recording from the caterpillar scene in the butterfly documentary. (And I was not consulted on this.) So, what went out on Channel Four was: a shot of the Chinese TV screen with a couple of American cowboys riding off into the horizon, and the sound track saying, “这些毛虫 zhè xiē máochóng / these hairy worms.”
So had the editor inadvertently aired on public media what the Chinese think of Westerners??
(China / London, 1983)
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