On the Presentation of Chinese Nationalism in Chen Kaige's 'Yellow Earth'

Kigan Chang
<siutao@aol.com>

'Yellow Earth' is a pivotal film in China artistically, from the point of view of the competing notions of film practice, and explicitly for its place within the continuing debate about the role of film in China. Both Chen Kaige (noted recently also as the director of 'The Emperor and the Assassin'), the director of the film, and his cinematographer Zhang Yimou are members of the "Fifth Generation" of Chinese film makers, the first group of students to graduate from the first class of the Beijing Film Academy, china's only film academy, which had been closed during the Great Cultural Revolution. Both artists had personally experienced the social dislocations inflicted by the policies of the "revolution," having had their formal education curtailed during their teens and suffered exile to distant rural areas to labor alongside the peasants.

'Yellow Earth' is a film deeply rooted in both the social realities of Chinese peasant life and, more specifically, the facts of contemporary Chinese history. The narrative of the film is deceptively spare: In 1939, a young soldier (an Eigth Route Armyman) named Guo Qing is sent into a border village in poverty-stricken North Shanxi Province to collect folk songs for adaptation by the Communist Party for polemical use. (One credo of Chinese Marxism was to learn from the people) He finds lodging in the cave of a local, a widowed father, and his two children, Cuiqiao, a teenage girl, and her younger brother. The girl establishes a relationship with this curious middle-aged outsider, but after he leaves, promising to return for her, her father persists in selling her in an arranged marriage to an older man to whom she had been betrothed since infancy. Rather than submitting to the patriarch's wish, she sails down the turbulent Yellow River in a small boat, apparently to her death. Too late, the cadre, at the end of the film, returns from Chairman Mao's military base in Yunan to find the land parched, and the peasants praying to the gods for rain, rather than seeking solutions from themselves or from Mao and his army in Yunan.

The dialogue in the film is notably spare, but the film conveys its dramatic tension through Chen's monumental direction, Zhang Yimou's impressive cinematography, who brilliantly depict the relationship of characters to the parched and barren fields of the Shanxi Loess plateau which so determinedly dominate their mode of dreary existence, and through the spare and fierce beauty of the songs themselves, each telling its tale of women's oppression.

Zhang's camera work is excellent for its still shots of the vast, barren world of hills and valleys with its sparse population living in caves. The camera seldom moves except in two scenes (a camera style of poeticism and ambiguity reminiscent of Yasujiro Ozu): the drum ritual in Yunan, and the prayer ritual for rain at the end. The film is noteworthy for its self-conscious framing, as in the scene in the fields when the whole family and the young soldier, Guo Qing, eat lunch together. The camera first tilts upward into the vast overcast sky, then downward so that the father seems to rise from the bottom of the frame, with the sky occupying most of the area above him as he prays for rain, until only his shoes remain visible at the top of the frame. Such self-conscious framing, with its strong suggestion of offscreen space, not only offers signification through delimiting the cinematic space, but also reveals the way we normally perceive reality.

Chen Kaige's austere and grave vision of the peasant life allows for no digression into melodrama, social commentary, or the merely folkloric. He is not just content to give an anthropological or ethnographic documentation of peasant lives. By setting his story in Shaanxi he ties it to the heartland of Chinese Communism. (It was there that Mao's legendary Long March terminated in 1935)

The ideology which has sustained Chinese society for thousands of years has so shaped the forms of hierarchy by which each subject within the culture constructs reality to the point that every person has insisted on his or her own perception of the world is indeed the world, the natural order of things pre-ordained by God and physical laws to be the way it is, and therefore reinforcing the age-old feudal tradition that there is no need for social and political change. The stillness of the shots and the timelessness they convey in the film reminds us of the way people on the plateau perceive time. Chinese culture has conditioned everyone immersed in it to perceive the world as constant and eternal. The framing, which self-consciously breaks the illusion of a harmonious order with heaven above, earth below and the humankind in between, leads the spectator to reflect on humanity's presumably harmonious relationship with nature. This positioning of the spectators and the uncomfortable feeling it arouses produce the effect of making us long for movement and progress. The repetitiveness of shots of vast arid hills with sky barely visible, and the tightness of the framing consequently conveyed, also make people long for water and the prosperity that comes with it.

The film, structured by rituals, focuses on such institutions as marriage and family to analyse the structure of an ideology that makes such feudal forces in society appear natural. Ironies created by the opposition of sight and sound, however, reveal the social relationships institutionalized by such rituals as unnatural. The timelessness of the persistence of feudal force and its struggle for existence is shown in scenes illustrative of the dour poverty and cultural backwardness in the village: meals consumed almost before they are served, a bridal feast that makes do with a carved wooden replica of the traditional fish course no one can afford, the simplicity of the domestic arrangements.

The patriarch of the family, poor, miserable and ignorant, accepts everything in life, including his poverty and suffering, as his fate. His pious worship for the heaven and earth is reflected in his belief that the harvest he gets from his own hard labors is a gift from nature. Misery and suffering have turned him into a callous and indifferent person who does everything the way things have always been done in the past, and this causes the tragedy. The father sees Gu Qing as an outsider who might taint his daughter's innocence by telling her of the liberated women in Yunan. As her protector he forces the girl into marriage with a man of the land, and the terrifying shot of the black hand reaching out for Cuiqiao on the marriage bed turns his act of protection into one of violation. Since this society has no place for an impure woman, her only alternative is suicide. Without knowing it the father has become the chief oppressor of the family and the direct cause of his daughter's death. The role of the father as both protector and violator is reinforced symbolically by the use of water in the prayer he leads in the final, ritualistic scene. Water, which has destroyed his daughter, is also a life-giving force to be worshipped, just as the Yellow River, which nurses the Chinese nation, also devours his daughter.

Ciuqiao's attempt to replace her traditional lament for her plight with Gu's campaign song eventually ends with its promise of Communist victory choked off before she can finish singing it, by the waters of the Yellow River (a symbol of the Chinese civilization) closing over her head as she attempts to swim across it to Gu's base in Yunan. This is indeed a scene, infused with a potent metaphorical force, which stands as an eloquent memorial to the struggle of a nation.

What Chen Kaige achieves in this film, more so than any other Fifth Generation film makers in China, is indeed his use of film art to suggest its political subtext. The cinematic allusions to traditional Chinese landscape painting, the slow pace, the static nature of much of the imagery, and the lack of much action all combine for thematic, as well as artistic, effects. Unlike earlier propaganda films on the Chinese revolution the attempt through a good deal of heroics and a contrived socialist realism to assure audiences of the importance of various political events, 'Yellow Earth' has taken an indirect path. The value of the subsequent revolution in land ownership, the social position of women, and the general social attitudes is here implied by the force of the filmic presentation of peasants stuck on the 'yellow earth' that will not give them a livelihood. Although the story is set in 1939, there is a carefully crafted timelessness about the film. On the banks of the Yellow River, in the very heartland of Chinese civilization, peasants have been enduring lives of despair and resignation for centuries.

However, what the camera invites us to look at is not the largely static landscape photograph per se, or the characterization per se, but the history of the Chinese civilization, to ponder why this ancient nation and culture, which one time in the course of history had such a brilliant civilization, should lag behind others in modern times. What is it, we are moved to ask, that seriously impedes social and political change? Is it an external force (read: Marxism), or is it something that resides in the Chinese mind-set (read: feudalism)? 'Yellow Earth' may raise more questions than it answers. Nevertheless, by turning our attention introspectively, the film sheds light on the root cause of the Chinese nation's ambivalent relationship to progress and modernization.

Bibliography

Rong, Weijing, 'On the Presentation of Nationalism through Film' in Semsel, George S., Hong Xia and Jianping Hou, editors, Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era (New York: Praeger, 1990).

Yau, C. M. Esther, ' 'Yellow Earth': Western Analysis and a Non-Western Text' in Berry, Chris, editor, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991).

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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