hi there! not a stupid question at all – I get to indulge in revisiting the stuff I learned during that hot second I thought I might become a film and media studies major!

So the effect I think you’re talking about, anon, is the Kuleshov effect – in which the context of a shot affects the viewer’s reception/interpretation of it. The example I saw in class was that of an actor with a pretty blank expression, but when juxtaposed with 1) a bowl of soup, 2) a girl in a coffin, and 3) a reclining lady, audience members interpreted the expression alternately as hunger, sorrow, and desire.

The catch? It was the same expression each time.

I hesitate to assign any sort of filmmaking tendency towards storytelling difference due national contexts (although they definitely exist, that’s for sure) – film studies is a fascinating and exceedingly complex field, partially for how global it is. Your average intro to film course will usually feature a great deal of Hollywood (classical Hollywood as a cinematic style is incredibly influential and a lil mindbending to study), but a good prof will also talk about the various influences the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Soviet montage, Japanese New Wave (and so on and so forth) have on contemporary cinema today. Filmmakers are constantly borrowing techniques and innovating stylistically off of other filmmakers’ work, regardless of national context. There’s a language that is close to universal hidden in audio-visual storytelling that, once you start investigating, is an endless pool of discovery.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that I don’t know if there’s a quintessentially ‘Chinese’ form of filmic storytelling at play here, but the juxtaposition of flashbacks in episode 39 and 50 are definitely interesting to look at!

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