Yellow Earth (黄土地 Huang tudi)

Director: Chen Kaige

Screenplay: Zhang Ziliang (based on Ke Lan's essay "Echoes of the Deep Ravine"

Cinematographer: Zhang Yimou

Art Director: He Qun

Music: Zhao Jiping

Cast: Xue Bai, Wang Xueqi, Tan Tuo, Liu Qiang

Studio: Guangxi Film Stduio, 1984

Description: VHS; color; sound; 89 minutes.

Synopsis:

Set in 1939, the film starts with a CCP military cadre, Gu Qing (Wang Xueqi), arriving in the Shanbei area around Yanan to collect folk songs for the army to use, so that "the people will know why they are suffering, why their women are beaten, and why they should rise up." Gu Qing stays with the very poor family of an 47-year old widower (Tan Tuo), his 14-year-old daughter, Cuoqiao (Xue Bai), and his younger son, Hanhan (Liu Qiang). While witnessing the harsh life of the local people, who believe that they are destined by their "fate," Gu describes to them an image of a different life in the south, where under the Communist regime arranged marriages have been banned and women there can cut their hair, fight against the Japanese, and can read and write. Sharing the fate of many peasant girls, Cuiqiao has been betrothed to an older man she has never seen. Gu's stories of life in the south offer her hope of escaping, so she asks Gu Qing to take her to Yanan. Without knowing her real situation, Gu tells her that because of regulations he has to gain official permission first, then he will return to retrieve her. After Gu leaves, Cuiqiao is forced to marry. In a desperate attempt to escape her torturous life, she sets out in search of the "other shore" by herself...

About the director:

Chen Kaige (1952-) was born Chen Aige in Beijing. He is the son of veteran filmmaker Chen Huaikai, who directed Song of Youth (1959). During the Cultural Revolution of 1965-68, he was sent down to be "re-educated", working with the peasants as a forest worker in a rubber plantation in Yunnan. At the age of fifteen, he became a member of Mao's Red Guard and publicly denounced his own father as a counter-revolutionary. He has written about this experience in an autobiography - My Life and Times As A Red Guard (1991).

In 1978, Chen Kaige joined the re-opened Beijing Film Academy (BFA), where he would graduate in 1982 with a group of talented classmates, including Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Junzhao, and others, who later are grouped as "the Fifth Generation" filmmakers and started "New Wave" in Chinese cinema in the 1980s. Yellow Earth (1984) is his first major work, which took Hong Kong Film Festival by storm and brought world-wide attention to Chinese cinema. His other important works include The Big Parade (1985), King Of The Children (1987), Life On A String (1991), Farewell My Concubine (1993), Temptress Moon (1996), The Emperor And The Assassin (1999), Killing Me Softly (2002), Together (2002).

Click here to read more about Chen Kaige and his works.

Zhang Yimou (1950-) is a native of Xi'an in Shaanxi Province. During his youth, his family suffered derision and exclusion because of their association with the Guomindang (Nationalist) Army. He abandoned school and worked as a laborer on a farm, and then in a textile mill. After the Cultural Revolution, he became a photographer and who was admitted to the cinematography department at Beijing Film Academy (BFA) in 1978 after a persistent appeal to the Minister of Culture. After graduation in 1982, Zhang was assigned to the Guangxi Film Studio in Southern China where he worked as a cinematographer, and it was there where he started collaborating with his former classmates Zhang Junzhao and Chen Kaige and served as the cinematographer of Zhang Junzhao's groundbreaking One and Eight (1984) and Chen's Yellow Earth (1984). Later, he was transferred to Xi'an Film Studio and served as both cinematographer and leading actor in Wu Tianming's Old Well (1987), which won him a best actor award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. He was permitted to make his directorial debut--Red Sorghum--in the same year and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He then started his career as a film director and made a series of internationally acclaimed films, including Ju Dou (1989), which won Best Film at the Chicago Film Festival and garnered an Academy Award nomination, Raise the Red Lantern (1992), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), Not One Less (1999), whihc won the coveted Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. Previously being considered as an essential arthouse director, however, Zhang turned to more market-oriented big-budget commercial productions in the 21st century, presenting to the world theater with two martial arts blockbusters, Hero (2002) and House of Flying Dagger (2004).

Click here and here to read more about Zhang Yimou and his works.

Questions to ponder: These are a few questions suggested for you to think about while reading the assigned articles and watching the film. Please jot down ideas and notes on details or scenes you think are relevant for class discussion. 1. Zhang Yingjin and others have claimed that this film is iconoclastic in film language and narrative style. In what ways do you think this is true? 2. What is the significance of the setting for the story of the film--Yellow River area, Yan'an area? 3. Some critics have suggested that the film questions certain myths central to Communist Party mythology. Do you agree? 4. How are the peasants represented in this film? What about the girl Cuiqiao? 5. In what ways are folk songs significant in the film?

Relevant readings:

Chow, Rey. "Silent is the Ancient Plain: Music, Filmmaking, and the Conception of Reform in China's New Cinema," in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 79-107.

McDougall, Bonnie, ed. The Yellow Earth: A Film by Chen Kaige With a Complete Translation of the Filmscript. HK: Chinese University Press, 1991.

Silbergeld, Jerome. "Drowning on the Dry Land: Yellow Earth and the Traditionalism of the 'Avant-Garde.'" In Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 1999, 15-52.

Yau, Esther CM "Yellow Earth: Western Analysis and a Non-Western Text." Film Quarterly 41.2 (1987-88):22-33.

Web Sources:

A compiled introduction to some of the important contemporary PRC film directors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Xie Jin.

"Chinese Cinema - 'The Fifth Generation'" (BBC's feature article about the Fifth Generation).

A resourceful webpage of Zhang Yimou prepared by Mary Farquhar for Sense of Cinema.