이안(李安) 감독의 영화를 통해 본 중국과 미국의 문화 비교

Abstract

Since 21st century, the distance between the nations is getting closer. This led people to connect more easily to the other countries and communicate with people from another side. It means people need to exchange the different culture to understand each other. Cultural exchange can be fully realized in the effort to accept the differences as well as, understand the aspects of the culture. In order to do this, the various cultural studies have been conducted to find distinctive features and values of various societies worldwide. As the "Global Era" has arrived, it is natural that people are exposed to many different cultures through various media. Especially, movies are the most important tools to understand the culture because they can contain the stories of the societies. For example, most of the people are aware of the aspect of American culture and history through Hollywood movies because the movies could reach almost everywhere in the world. From this notion, I would like to find out the cultural similarities and differences between Chinese and American culture through the movies. Firstly, I define the meaning of culture and attempt to analysis Chinese and American culture. To analyze the study more effective,"Cultural Dimensions Theory" has been introduced as an index. This theory explains the effects of a society's culture on the value of its members and how the values related to behavior. It contains six cultural dimensions which are “Power distance index” (PDI), “Individualism vs. collectivism” (IDV), “Masculinity vs. femininity” (MAS), “Uncertainty avoidance” (UAI), Long term orientation (LTO), and “Indulgence vs. restraint” (IND). These six indexes are used to draw out distinctive characters of each culture. Movies from director Ang Lee have selected to illustrate the cultural comparison. The director was born in Taiwan from the family who came from the Chinese mainland. He studied in both in Taiwan and the U.S. Through his background and genius in filmmaking, he has been making award-winning movies which project cultural aspects of each country as well as has traditional values and social issues. I attempt to discuss the dialogue, background, and scenes from his film based on the major themes which are families, individual and society, and minorities. The study has found the fact that the scenes and the dialogues from Ang Lee’s movies are well reflected by the cultural aspects analyzed by the theory of Hofstede. Especially, he depicts the societies and history authentically with its own culture. The reason should be his attitude to understand the culture as well as his background and education. Ang Lee also emphasized the important issues such as globalization, gender, religion, politics. As the director presents these topics to the public, he attempted to seek to understand and communicate with other cultures. This study has shown the cultural differences rather than similarities between China and America. However, it may be natural to have different cultural aspects in each country. Hence the most important thing is to know the cultural difference to accept. This study should not be sufficient to cover all the aspects of Chinese and American cultures however I hope this study could help to act as a springboard for further study to minimize the cultural barriers.