It’s been 24 years since the first film in the Harry Potter series premiered, and the fandom has been through ups, downs, and many controversies. Having an impulse to rewatch this series, I think it would be interesting to scrutinize its representation of diversity, especially in its 4th film, where the international magical events emerged.
At first, Harry Potter and his friends attended the Quidditch World Cup. After they were teleported, the background was the picturesque landscape of the Seven Sisters cliffs in England, exactly in the quintessential angle that would appear in postcards. When they walked through the campsite, numerous flags could be sighted, and most of them were the same as the national flags in our Muggle world: the flags of the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, the United States 🇺🇸, Italy 🇮🇹, India 🇮🇳, Uganda 🇺🇬, Bulgaria 🇧🇬, Australia 🇦🇺/New Zealand 🇳🇿, and Argentina 🇦🇷/Nicaragua 🇳🇮. There are plenty of flags in black and red stripes and sometimes with a pattern in the middle, which I fail to identify. After the arena was shown the first time on the screen, it’s shown that a group of Black men dressed in ornamented traditional capes and hairpieces are entering the arena. It attempts to emphasize the ‘world’ in the Quidditch World Cup and provoke viewers’ imagination by showing various flags across continents and the Black audience.
In this match, the Irish team was against the Bulgarian team. It was revealed that the black and red represent Bulgaria, and those flags are theirs. The magical firework showcased an Irish leprechaun tap dancing in the sky, and the signature of Bulgaria is only their athlete Krum. It’s rather distinctive that Bulgaria is the only country using fictional flags, completely different from its flag in the real world, even though we can catch a glimpse of the real flag shown at the campsite.
After Harry Potter returned to Hogwarts, the Triwizard Tournament was announced, and two other wizard schools were introduced to the audience. First, the Beauxbatons Academy of Magic has all-female students, who arrived in a carriage carried by unicorns, and they are French-speaking, in light-blue skirts, and hyper-feminine. In the entrance scene, they walked by the aisle, moaning, and butterflies flew out their chests. The female students of Hogwarts looked annoyed, and the male students looked amazed. The lens shows Ron Weasley’s flabbergasted face and cuts to Beauxbatons students’ asses, which is a textbook display of the male gaze.
On the opposite, Durmstrang is ‘from the North’ with a German name and has all-male students with bald heads, whose uniforms are in military style with fur coats and ushanka-style Russian fur hats. The Bulgarian athlete Viktor Krum was also in this school. While entering, they were oozing a hyper-masculine aura—they growled, thumped long wooden canes on the ground, and blew fire into the shape of a dragon. The two schools tend to represent the other homogeneous sides in the spectrum of Europe: one is soft and seductive, and the other is dark and dangerous, while Hogwarts in England is depicted as more modern with a balance of diversity.
The ball scene is one of the highlights in this film. The Patil sisters’ infamous traditional Indian clothes are constantly at the center of discussions. As the dance partners of the protagonists. It’s been commented that their dresses and jewelery cannot even be counted as going-out outfits, let alone glamorous outfits for a ball, or Bollywood-level costume design for an on-screen visual feast. As the most important person-of-color character in the whole series, Cho Chang has the most lines, and her actions affected the main plot. She was the partner of another Hogwarts’ champion in the ball and was wearing a silver qipao, a traditional Chinese costume. Students from Durmstrang still wear military uniforms at this ball.
Support the writer and read more. (As the website is waiting for an upgrade, we now use the old-school way to send out files manually. We’ll email you the bonus in 3-5 days. Thank you so much for your patience.)
Comments