Tony Rayns (International Reception)

Film historian, scholar and critic, with a particular specialisation towards East Asian cinemas. Was, in the 1980s, one of the most prominent champions of the Chinese New Wave films.


Relevant books/essays/articles:
The New Chinese Cinema: an Introduction (London: Faber & Faber, 1989)


Relevant quotes:

• "The trouble is, even “smart” people in Western countries know next to nothing about China’s modern history, and apparently lack the empathy to understand what it’s like to live in the space between authoritarian government and out-of-control profiteering. This wouldn’t matter a toss, of course, except that serious-minded Chinese filmmakers need a global audience to survive. There’s no state support for the “art” sector in Mainland cinema (both Taiwan and Hong Kong do now offer modest subsidies to selected filmmakers), and the all-powerful market with its new 18-screen multiplexes has no time for “art.” Worse, despite pressure, China still hasn’t introduced a proper ratings system—the thinking seems to be that all films should be “suitable” for all ages—while political and military censorship processes continue to exert a strong grip. Hence the need that Jia and his contemporaries have for distribution abroad. That’s getting harder to find, and less lucrative—as even the likes of Zhang Yimou have discovered. No Chinese filmmaker has been more thoughtful or adventurous in battling all these adversities than Jia Zhangke. Accepting commissions, as long as they allow him a completely free hand, is one of the main planks of his creative survival strategy. You’d think “smart” people would get it. Let’s open a parenthesis for a moment to consider the sad case of Chen Kaige. In 1988 Chen took his best film, King of the Children, to Cannes. He came away not only without a prize but also dumbfounded to discover that the huge majority of Western viewers knew nothing about the Cultural Revolution (and so weren’t able to supply the off-screen realities the film took as given) and had absolutely no sense of either the burden of China’s traditional culture or the imperative in the late ‘60s to follow a strict Maoist line. Since then, Chen has struggled in film after film to find ways of dealing with Chinese issues that will be intelligible to foreigners. He tried mythic abstraction (Life on a String, 1991), sexualized melodrama (Farewell My Concubine, 1993; Temptress Moon, 1996) and historical spectacle (The Emperor and the Assassin, 1998) before abjectly surrendering to Mammon with riffs on Billy Elliot (Together, 2002) and Lord of the Rings (The Promise, 2005). (He’s also struggled to overcome his inhibitions about dealing with sex, but that’s another story.) This sorry tale is just one of the many negative examples that Jia Zhangke has before him when he considers how to go on producing credible and innovative cinema in China. Close parenthesis." - in CinemaScope (http://cinema-scope.com/currency/currency-i-wish-i-knew-jia-zhangke-china/)
• "A dozen of the most innovative and exciting films made anywhere in the world in the last few years have come from China… These films have won Chinese cinema a much higher international profile than it has ever known before. The irony underlying these gains is that several of the ‘new wave’ films are now better known abroad than they are at home, where they have been attacked both for their failure at the box-office and for their suggestions of ideological deviation from CP orthodoxies." (from essay in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema)

Interviewed London august 2016.

Domestic criticism/attacks (Domestic Reception)

• Ideological attacks were raised on the validity of the 'New Chinese cinema' around 1987, by the likes of Wu Yiqong, the then-head of the financially troubled Shanghai Film Studio. Wu dragged politics into the picture by accusing the films of the Fifth Generation of failing to 'serve the people' because the films were regarded as inaccessible and obscure. This provided ammunition for politicians who at that period were in a cycle of stamping down so-called 'bourgeois liberalism'. Certain filmmakers from the older generations joined in on these critiques, such as the likes of Xia Yan, ironically himself an innovative young director who'd come up against the system in the 1930s. E.g. Wu Yiqong quote: "One of the biggest problems in the theory world today is getting the value of film all upside down. Which comes first – its existential value or its essential value? If an artist makes a film without taking the audience into account at all, then how can they see the film’s essential value as a medium for popularising things with the masses?"
• The films were also attacked on economic grounds, as not being able to win back any more at the box office (the weaknesses of the Chinese film distribution system are relevant here), meaning their production was seen as not justifiable on financial terms, although Chris Berry reminds us that government-commissioned reform films taking up much higher budgets and counting for 40% of annual productions (as opposed to 10-15% for Fifth Generation or 'exploratory' films) lost money but nobody dared to criticise those for the same reasons.
• Accusations of orientalism and of making films deliberately trying to appeal to foreigners and foreign film festivals have been common. See for instance the comments of Dai Qing concerning Raise the Red Lantern.

Stylistic and Aesthetic Similarities across the New Waves (Cross-connection)

The propensity for rural settings and folk/peasant-based influences

Examples(folk/peasant traditions): The Horse Thief, On the Hunting Ground, Gabbeh, A Mongolian Tale, Song of Tibet, Yellow Earth ...
Examples (rural setting): All the above + Abbas Kiarostami films, Hou Hsiao-Hsien films, Samira Makhmalbaf films,

Note the influence of Wu Tianming at the Xi'an Film Studio in legitimising the genre termed 'western' as any film based in one of the autonomous provinces of China. This led to the production of several more rural-based films, but really there were other reasons behind this common feature of many Fifth Generation films in the 1980s. Firstly, these directors had all been sent to the countryside as zhiqing during the Cultural Revolution and had formative experiences there which were a key source of their desire to express themselves. Secondly, they had been sent to, and found more freedom at, smaller regional studios in the provinces.

Life on a String (Film)

1991. Dir: Chen Kaige.


Context:
British-Japanese-Dutch-German-Italian coproduction...





The Film:

• "My favorite Chen film of the decade, closer to the quiet, tragic beauty of Yellow Earth than the excesses of the later films. This, like Temptress Moon, is hard to follow at first, and assumes some knowledge of Chinese tradition and folklore. There’s also an odd restaurant surrounded by waterfalls that may or not be some metaphysical waystation between this world and the next. The plot follows an old blind musician who wanders around rural northern China, regarded as a holy man by the locals. According to some custom, if a blind musician breaks 1000 strings during his lifetime, he will be able to regain his sight. The old man has a young protégée, who occasionally rages at his blindness and wants to see. The young man falls in love with a local girl, but trouble arises with her parents. Gradually, it’s revealed that while the old man has tried to put love and the desire to see behind him, he still feels tormented by lost love and the promise that his eyesight may return, causing conflict with the young man. Throughout a mysterious figure, who resembles a statue of a God of Death in the temple where the two live, appears in crowds watching the players perform, grinning mysteriously. While the colors don’t pop as much as in Yellow Earth, there are still lots of lovely landscape shots. Appreciation of this film may depend a lot on what you make of the two big sequences where the old man sings (to stop a fight between two villages, and at the end), and your ability to accept its many ellipses that are never quite filled." [CriterionForum, 1990s list thread, Feb 2015]

References:
http://nasharit.ru/video?name=idi_i_poi_/_zhizn_na_strune_/_Life_on_a_String_/_Bian_Zou_Bian_Chang&site=vk&oid=22687267&id=159509512&hash=77673485938ddeb4

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTQ0MzY2NzY=.html

Wu Ziniu (Director)

Born: 1953, Lechuan, Sichuan province. Fifth Generation director.

His film The Dove Tree (1985) was the first Fifth Generation film to be banned.

The Big Parade (Film)

1986. Dir: Chen Kaige. Cin: Zhang Yimou. Scr: Gao Lili.


Context:
"Director Chen Kaige, cinematographer Zhang Yimou and designer He Qun started work on The Big Parade almost as soon as they had finished Yellow Earth. The film was shot in the spring and summer of 1985 and it went into post-production the normal way in the autumn. It had reached fine-cut stage by November, when the PLA took strong objection to it. Chen Kaige initially refused to modify the film in any way and so it lay substantially complete but unreleasable for nearly a year. Chen finally agreed to make various changes, purely for the sake of his producers at Guangxi Film Studio, to whom he was of course indebted for his break as a director." [Tony Rayns, Monthly Film Bulletin 1988]











Resources:
http://www.ntnu.edu.tw/tcsl/Media_Language/kaige/filmography/dayuebing.html
http://nasharit.ru/video?name=bolshoi_parad_/_The_Big_Parade_/_Da_yue_bing_(_1986_/1987_)_rezh._chen_kaige_/_Chen_Kaige&site=vk&oid=-21996785&id=164879576&hash=1c7d2195ae8a369a
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/12/magazine/china-s-cultural-crackdown.html (Contemporary review)

China Film Corporation (Industry)

Based in Beijing, but with branch offices throughout the country. In the 1980s, domestic distribution was a monopoly of the China Film Corporation. It was also responsible for buying and distributing foreign movies, while its import/export department also handles all overseas sales of Chinese films.

Zhang Zeming (Director)

Born: 1951, Guangzhou. Fifth Generation director, although not part of the 1982 graduates of the Beijing Film Academy. He twice tried to get in but twice failed, before getting a job working at the Pearl River Studio in Guangzhou.


http://www.scmp.com/article/641210/also-showing-zhang-zeming

To Live (Film)

http://www.aems.illinois.edu/downloads/To_Live.pdf
http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/04/to-live-zhang-yimou-1994.html

The Blue Kite (Film)

1993. Dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang.








The Film:
Lu Tonglin: "The film, mainly based on the life story of a boy from Beijing named Lin Dayu or Tietou (Iron Head), presents the world from his perspective. Along with his mother, Tietou lives through the most important political movements in the history of Communist China, that is, the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, the Great Leap Forward in 1958, and the Cultural Revolution in 1966. His mother, Chen Shujuan, loses her three successive husbands during these political movements. Tietou’s father, Lin Shaolong, sent to a labor camp in a border region as a rightist, is killed by a falling tree while chopping wood. His “uncle,” Li Guogdong, falls in love with his mother partly out of guilt (during the Anti-Rightist Campaign he had reported his private conversation with Lin and another friend). Soon after his marriage to Shujuan, Li dies of liver failure partly due to malnutrition caused by “three years of natural disaster” – a convenient name for the economic disaster caused by the Great Leap Forward. Tietou’s later stepfather, Wu, suffering from severe heart disease, dies during the Cultural Revolution after humiliation and torture at the hands of Red Guards. The film is divided into three segments, each of which has a title written in a childish hand: “father,” “uncle,” and “stepfather” – successive fathers for the protagonist. Despite its highly subjective perspective, Blue Kite, like the two minority films, reveals a concern with one fundamental problem: individuals facing a powerful social institution."

"Furthermore, from 1986, the year he made Horse Thief, to 1993, the year for Blue Kite, Fifth Generation filmmakers underwent radical changes. On the Hunting Ground and Horse Thief were sponsored by the stateowned studios Inner Mongolian and Xi’an in the mid-1980s. At the beginning of the open-door reformist policy, Xi’an Studio was famous for its support for formal innovations. In this context, box-office failure would not greatly effect the financial situation of the filmmaker’s socialist “iron bowl.” By 1992, since the film industry in China had become market-oriented, box-office value had become predominant in measuring a film’s success or failure. At the same time, well-known Fifth Generation directors started seeking investments from multinational corporations. In this case, their works depended even more on commercial success in a global market. Understandably, the antinarrative and experimental tendency in Tian’s minority films can no longer survive in the new world. Since the relative commercial success of Zhang Yimou’s first three movies in the international market, most Fifth Generation directors have multiplied their efforts to make conventional narrative films, often by re-creating eroticized and suffering images of Chinese female beauties in the early 1990s. In this respect, Tian’s Blue Kite bears many characteristics of its time. Nevertheless, Tian followed the Zhang Yimou model31 more discreetly than most of his colleagues – such as Chen Kaige, for example, who wholeheartedly embraced this model in his Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Temptress Moon (1996). Although Tian’s film was forbidden in China, ironically, it was one of the few films made by Fifth Generation directors during this period that tried genuinely to address the Chinese audience despite its focus on the global market. Unlike most films in the Zhang Yimou model, Blue Kite avoided ritualizing Chinese tradition."






Reception:
Distribution: Kino International (US theatrical and home video); UGC Distribution (France theatrical).

Root-searching literature (Culture/History)

Literary movement, coming in the 1980s, shortly after the Scar literature movement.


References
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~chen24r/classweb/wp/Postmao.html

A Girl from Hunan (Film)

Xiang nu xiao xiao. 1986. Dir: Xie Fei.
Based on story by Shen Congwen, a famed Chinese veteran writer whose work often critiqued old traditionalist Chinese ways of life.

Zhao Jiping (Industry)

Born 1945. Composer. Studied at Conservatory of Music in Beijing. A key Fifth Generation collaborator having scored the music for many of their most important films.

Composed the music for:

• Yellow Earth
• The Big Parade
• Red Sorghum
• Ju Dou
• Raise the Red Lantern
• The Story of Qiu Ju
• Farewell My Concubine
• To Live
• Temptress Moon

He Qun (Industry)

Born 1956, Beijing. Graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982 (from the 'design' class), as part of the 'Fifth Generation'. Was sent to Guangxi Film Studio, alongside his friends and fellow graduates Zhang Junzhao and Zhang Yimou. There, they would make The One and the Eight together, for which He would serve as art director. He would also be art director for Chen Kaige's first two films Yellow Earth and The Big Parade, making him one of the key Fifth Generation collaborators in those early years. Subsequently he would turn to directing in the 1990s.

Ah Cheng (Culture/History)

aka Zhong Acheng. Born 1949. Writer and screenwriter.
Worked with, and befriended, Chen Kaige whilst the two of them were zhiqing (sent-down youths) at a rubber plantation during the years of the Cultural Revolution. After this period, in the late 1970s he would become a writer and a member of artistic avant-garde circles. His short story 'King of the Children', inspired by his work camp experiences during the CR, would inspire Chen to adapt it into his film King of the Children.
He would also write screenplays including collaborations with Tian Zhuangzhuang.

Scar Literature (Culture/History)

This is generally the name attributed to the literary wave that occurred after the Cultural Revolution, when a new generation of writers wrote of their experiences under Mao, strongly influenced by what they (as intellectuals and urban youths) had lived through during the process of rural re-education and population redistribution (aka the 'Down to the countryside movement') leaving their city lives to go work in farms and labour camps in the countryside. They of course went against the pre-1978 traditions of favouring class consciousness issues instead of individual creativity, and that art should serve politics and specifically socialism, as had been prescribed by the 1942 Yan'an forum for writers and artists.

It is typically marked as having started with the 1978 story 'The Scar' by Lu Xinhua. The mood was one of anger, at the wasted youth and talent, persecution and suffering during the CR, and during this time of slight liberalisation under Deng Xiaoping they took the opportunity to harshly criticise the policies implemented by Mao (but still not directly attributing the blame on the CCP or Communist ideals themselves), or more typically by the 'Gang of Four'. A desire for reassessment of the past and of change to a new fresh start were also features of this movement, making a film such as King of the Children (based on a Scar literature story by Ah Cheng) potentially recognisable as a cinematic example of Scar literature.



Closely connected, but not always equivalent to, the movement which started in the mid-1980s known as Root-searching literature, which it gave way to, as well as subsiding into more introverted, humanistic and less specifically or directly critical literature.

References
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~chen24r/classweb/wp/Postmao.html
http://contemporary_chinese_culture.academic.ru/479/Lu_Xinhua

King of the Children (Film)

Haizi wang. 1987. Dir: Chen Kaige. Scr: Chen Kaige, Wan Zhi (aka Chen Maiping), He Jianjun(?).

Context:
Based on story by Ah Cheng, with whom Chen had spent his zhiqing days, working together in a rubber plantation during the Cultural Revolution.
It was Chen's first film to be produced at Xi'an Film Studio, under the wings of Wu Tianming, having moved from Guangxi Film Studio and his collaborator Zhang Yimou (who would himself soon make the move from cinematographer to director).

Reportedly Chen re-edited the film after seeing Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Dust in the Wind, and gave the rhythm an even more impressionistic feel. [Cheshire, Film Comment 1992]

The Film:


Relation to ideas about Chinese culture: "Chen does not attach to copying the value of a positive meaning as does Ah Cheng; rather in it he sees the contemporary Chinese culture's deconstruction of traditional Chinese culture. For Chen, the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution is not an accident but the summation of the Chinese civilisation, and the act of copying, to which the students are reduced, signifies the emptiness of culture itself." [Rey Chow, Primitive Passions, 120]

Reception:
Distribution: ICA (UK theatrical, 1988); Orion Classics (US theatrical).





References:
http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/2009/05/967-109-hai-zi-wang-king-of-the-children-1987-chen-kaige/
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?task=view&id=1154
"The Pain of a Half Taoist" - an Jingfu, CInematic Landscapes pp117-125

The Three Major Film Festivals (International Reception)

Of key importance to the worldwide recognition of the Chinese New Cinema and other 'new waves' of world cinema, especially in the 1990s. In the 1980s, other, small festivals had already started the process. As Dudley Andrew writes: "As European art cinema was moribund, desperate festivals began looking elsewhere for signs of life. And life was found in what I call the Second Set of New Waves. By the early ’80s, as if sucked into a vacuum, came films from places never before thought of as cinematically interesting or viable: Mainland China, Senegal, Mali, Ireland, Taiwan, and Iran. This second set of waves is distinct from those of the 1960s not only in their provenance but in the way they functioned in a greatly changed international system."

Cannes
Held yearly in May. Initially founded in 1939, it only really took off as an international film festival in the post-war era.


Venice
Held yearly in late August/early September. Oldest international film festival in the world. Founded in 1932, under the title Esposizione internazionale d'arte cinematografica, it was under the influence of Mussolini's regime between 1934 and 1942, prompting the Cannes film festival to open as an alternative to its fascist rival.
In 1961, Ebrahim Golestan's documentary about an oildfield fire in Southern Iran, A Fire, edited by Forough Farrokhzad, was the first Iranian film to win a major international festival prize when it won the Bronze Medal.


Berlin
Held yearly in February. Set up in 1951by German and American authorities to show off to the world the success of de-nazification and of Germany's revival under American guidance.



"In the 1980s, the Big Three festivals were especially skittish about showing films from Taiwan for geopolitical reasons. Probably out of fear of being passed over for films by the Fifth Generation in mainland China, they did not want to antagonize the PRC which was trying everything to prevent Taiwan from gaining international recognition as the Republic of China. Berlin had invited Hou to show two films outside of the competition in 1985, but then withdrew the invitation for unspecified reasons. after Hou won at Nantes two years in a row, the big festivals clearly decided they could no longer afford not to show films from Taiwan, but they were presented in the non-competitive sidebars. Venice finally took the plunge in 1989 by entering City of Sadness in the competition. This changed the course of Taiwanese cinema, making it a true festival powerhouse in the 1990s" [James Udden, HHH (Suchenski), p130]



References:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/film/84968.htm (China)
Dudley Andrew, Waves of New Waves and the International Film Festival.
Bill Nichols, New Cinemas and the film festival circuit.

Black Snow (Film)

Ben ming nian. 1990. Dir: Xie Fei. Scr: Liu Heng.

Context:
The film's urban setting and handheld camerawork differentiates it from Xie's other, rural/province-set work and its tranquil smooth stylistics.

The Film:


Reception:
Winner of Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Liu Heng (Culture/History)

Born 1954, Beijing. Writer, novelist and screenwriter of the same era/generation as the 5th Generation filmmakers and proponent of the Scar literature movement.

During the Cultural Revolution, he was a zhiqing (sent-down youth) and got displaced to the countryside and worked in farms and factories.

His short story 'Dogshit Food' won national literary prizes and was the basis for the film Ju Dou, which he also worked on the screenplay for. Also wrote the novel the film Black Snow was based on, which director Xie Fei was drawn to for its realist style and characters, as well as again working on the screenplay for that film too.

Xie Fei (Director)

Born: 1942, Yan'an.

• Graduated from Beijing Film Academy in the mid-1960s as part of the Fourth Generation, but like his peers did not get the freedom to make the films he wanted due to the Cultural Revolution. Instead, greater artistic openings only came for him in the 1980s and 90s, contemporaneous to the horizon-expanding of the 5th Generation's cinema.
• His 'real' (non-propaganda) debut came in 1983 with the film Our Fields, when Xie was already in his fourties.
• His two most famous and internationally acclaimed films are Black Snow (1990), and Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993), recipients of the Silver and Golden Bear respectively at Berlinale.
• Currently teaches at the Beijing Film Academy, where he has taught since its post-CR re-opening, and hence he taught members of the Fifth Generation (remember in his talk, he spoke of their obsessive film-watching in all-nighter session with only Chinese buns to keep them going). He himself claims that in his peak years he taught for 2 years out of 3, and shot a film in the other year, with the twin practices of teaching and filming both reinforcing each other.
• Has made a number of films set in, shot in and specifically about Chinese ethnic minority regions and peoples (Mongolia and Tibet), much like Tian Zhuangzhuang or some of the NIC films, such as Gabbeh. 

Filmography:

• ...
• Our Fields (1983)
• A Girl from Hunan (1986)
• Black Snow (1990)
• Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993)
• A Mongolian Tale (1995)
• Song of Tibet (2000)

References:
Live talk with Xie at BFI, August 2014
Interview + booklet on Black Snow DVD, Second Run

Ju Dou (Film)

1990. Dir: Zhang Yimou (w/ Yang Fengliang). Scr: Liu Heng.

Context:
Based on short story by Liu Heng (link to a translation below).
Zhang's CR experience of labour in a textile factory can be seen as informing some parts of this film.

The Film:

Zhang makes typical use of eye-popping colour cinematography, especially helped by several set pieces with the colour dyes.

It is possible to read the film's plot in many ways, including on Freudian terms, but also allegorically: the cruel old man might represent Confucianist traditions, and the blank-faced seemingly intrinsically evil boy the more modern Maoist dictatorship and the Cultural Revolution (in which of course Mao encouraged the youths to commit the anarchic revolts he was after). The central couple are then torn between these two miserable options.


Reception:




















References:
http://www.clockwatching.net/~vroom/zyimou.html
http://www.filmsufi.com/2012/09/ju-dou-zhang-yimou-and-yang-fengliang.html
http://www.academia.edu/9192367/Liu_Heng_Dogshit_Food_trans._Sabina_Knight (Original story)

The Horse Thief (Film)

Dao Ma Zei.  1986. Dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang. Cin: Hou Yong.

Context:
Wu Tianming at Xi'an Film Studio was aggressively purchasing novel rights at this time when he sought rights for this novel by Zhang Rui. Zhang then informed Wu that he and Tian Zhuangzhuang had already penned a screenplay (shortly after Tian made On the Hunting Ground) and that if he wanted to make it a film Tian had to direct it. Wu agreed to this.

During this time the Chinese censors still forbade the use of any dialects for film dialogue and so they asked for the film to be dubbed into Mandarin. This Mandarin dubbed version became the standard version in China, but the original Tibetan soundtrack was able to be rescued for the French and US releases.


The Film:

Lu Tonglin: "The film portrays the life of a Tibetan named Norbu and his family. Although its story line is seemingly stronger than that of On the Hunting Ground, Horse Thief challenges its viewers more because most of its religious scenes are often loosely related, if not unrelated, to the diegetic world. Taking into consideration the great proportion of religious scenes, the film develops almost on two separate fronts: a feature on Norbu and his family, and a documentary on Tibetan religious rituals."
"This film presents the life of Norbu, a Tibetan living on the margins of the Qinghai Province during the 1920s and relying on horse thievery to support his family. Because he robbed several Muslim messengers of governmental gifts for a temple, Norbu and his family are expelled from the tribe by the headman. Partly due to hardship in exile, his two-year-old son Tashi falls ill. Despite all their prayers, Norbu and his wife Dolma fail to save their son’s life. After burying his body in the snowy land, Norbu and Dolma start a long and strenuous pilgrimage journey, by the end of which his wife has become pregnant. Since Norbu believes that his first son’s death results from a divine punishment, he decides to steal no longer. In order to keep his promise, the horse thief is reduced to the lowest job, serving as a surrogate for the evil river ghost in a religious ritual, which no one else would do despite its financial incentive. (Even the actor playing Norbu was reluctant to perform this role, as he was afraid of contempt from his community.) As a result of his job, the tribe is even more determined to refuse Norbu’s plea for a possible return. As worse comes to worst, Norbu is forced to sell his beloved horse, which until this point has followed him everywhere. Afterward, he returns to its new owner’s tent to bring his horse some food for the last time and bid the animal farewell. Taken as a horse thief again, he is severely beaten by the new owner. On a stormy night, Norbu sends his wife and the child away on the back of a stolen horse in order to save the life of his newborn son, while he himself commits suicide in front of the tower of sky burial."
"The film presents three sequences of sky burial, often using exactly the same footage, each one closer than the last to the hero of the narrative world, Norbu. In the introductory sequence, the sky burial for an unknown individual offers a seemingly universal version of this religious ritual. Then, in the middle of the film, from Norbu’s impassive perspective, the film presents the sky burial of the headman’s father. Norbu himself is excluded from the ritual, and his gift has been disdainfully rejected by the headman because it came from an impure source, his thievery. As a result, as an unwelcome intruder, Norbu sits alone, watching the ceremony from a distance. Granny and the father of Norwe, another horse thief, earlier spoke of their belief that sacred hawks would send the soul of the headman’s father to heavens by eating his flesh. However, they believe, since Norbu and Norwe sin against heaven through thievery, the divine birds will certainly refuse to eat their bodies after their death; hence their souls will never be able to reach the heavens. As if to contradict this prediction, in the last sequence the image of Norbu’s dagger, drenched in blood and abandoned on the snowy ground, suggests his suicide near the tower of sky burial. Presumably, hawks perform their duty of sky burial for the horse thief, although monks, unlike in the two previous scenes, are conspicuously absent. Norbu’s implied suicide near the tower deliberately challenges the common faith in his community according to which a former horse thief is not entitled to sky burial – as Granny explained earlier. At the same time, this challenge is also an expression of unshakable faith in religious salvation."

Reception:
Distribution: International Film Circuit (US Theatrical and home video, 1988)

Joris Ivens recommended it to Bertolucci, then in China making The Last Emperor. Bertolucci suggested to Tian that he submits it to the Venice Film Festival, but Tian back then had no idea how to do that or even what the festival was...

Sight&Sound review 1987 (Stanbrook): compares to Paradjanov (can some of M. Makhmalbaf's films be too?)


References: 
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?task=view&id=1173

The Black Cannon Incident (Film)

Hei Pao Shi Jian. 1986. Dir: Huang Jianxin.

 Context

The film is often seen as a post-socialist satire on the state of things during the Deng reform era. The ineffectual intellectual (the protagonist) associated with the desire for progress is held back by the remnants of a bureaucracy which cannot go away.

The film can also be seen as a subversion of the spy genre common in the 1950s, which was a reflection of that era's national security fears and paranoia (see essay in Chinese Films in Focus).

The Film

• A kind of postsocialist reworking of the famous literary work ‘Story of Ah Q’, it satirises the regime more deeply than any film reviewers dared admit at the time.
• The sets, especially the all-white symmetric conference room with the absurdly giant clock overlooking everyone, are distinctly modernist rather than realist. This room should typically feel safe and imbued with a benevolent authority linked to the Party, yet this coldness and absurdity makes it feel totally different.
• The affable and honest German engineer Hans Schmidt is seen as perplexed and confused by the backstage intrigues and paranoia of his Chinese hosts --- a subversion of the role of the foreigner, typically the malevolent instigator of an external threat, in the spy film genre during the Maoist period.
• The 360-degrees pan at the end (also circularity of other scenes and objects like the spinning ball-bearing, the chess piece itself and its container substitute).... Huang linked it to the concept of a 'Strange Loop' (Hofstadter), a bit like a Mobius strip. In the end everything is back where it started, because the 'threat', the black cannon, was non-existent.

Reception


Resources:
Essay by Pickowicz on Huang Jianxin's trilogy + essay by Farquhar and Berry in 'Cinematic Landscapes/

Huang Jianxin (Director)

Born: 1954, Xi'an. 'Fifth Generation' director, although not technically a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, but he did study some courses there over a year period after the 1982 graduation of the so-called 'Fifth Generation' graduates.
While at Xi'an Film Studio, he was spotted as one of the most promising assistant directors, and then-studio head Wu Tianming recommended he go take the intensive directing course at the BFA. Made an early short film which had censorship problems.made his first feature film The Black Cannon Incident in 1984, which in the context of post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping was a particularly scathing and audacious piece of satire. His next two films continued to tread similar ground, being cynical satires and exposes of China's bureaucracy and underlying failure to truly modernise beyond surface rhetoric. The three of them together have been called a 'post-socialist trilogy'.

In recent years, he has apparently changed (or been forced to) in his filmmaking interests, and has made a series of state-commissioned propaganda epics.

References:
Pickowicz in New Chinese Cinemas, 54-.

Censorship (Domestic Reception)

• The Film Bureau in Beijing: set production levels for 16 main studios (in 1989), but responsibility for choice of projects was devolved to individual studio heads.

Lu Xun (Culture/History)

1881-1936. Writer of The Story of Ah Q and Diary of a Madman. Key proponent of the left-wing intellectual movement in 1910s and 1920s, e.g. the May Fourth Movement. Typically regarded as the forefather of modern Chinese literature, along with Shen Congwen.

The concept of the 'crowd', passive and voyeuristic and letting things happen, is an important notion to his work and his conception of the Chinese psyche. Lu Xun himself was deeply moved and outraged when he watched a documentary footage of executions under Japanese rule and saw the numbed stupor of the Chinese crowds watching. At that time he gave up a career in medicine to become a writer, with the intention to jolt the audiences out of such a stupor. Apathetic crowds appear often in his work, notably in The Story of Ah Q.

Metaphor of the 'iron house' for China... windowless prison where most are asleep but for an enlightened few...

The Story of Ah Q, and the character of Ah Q himself, are extremely influential archetypes, in many films. For example, Huang Jianxin's The Black Cannon Incident, Jia Zhangke's Xiao Wu,...

Zhang Junzhao (Director)

Born: 1952, Henan.
Raised in Xinjiang province, in the uppermost north-west corner of China. His high-school education, like many others, was interrupted in 1966 with the start of the Cultural Revolution. He then joined the army as an ordinary soldier. For a while he would work for the Urumqi People's Theatre, from 1974 on.  He enrolled to the directors' course at Beijing Film Academy in 1978 and was hence a 'Fifth Generation' Graduate in 1982. Was sent to work at Guangxi Film Studio, where alongside Zhang Yimou, Xiao Feng and He Qun, he set up a 'Youth Film Unit' and made the film The One and the Eight.

After his debut film however, he moved on to making more commercially minded films. He was effectively then the first of the young 'fifth generation' graduates to turn to more commercial box-office oriented filmmaking. His films after The One and the Eight included a football film (Come On, China!), the bandit movie The Lonely Murderer, and a psycho-thriller (Arc Light), none of which gained anywhere near the same critical acclaim or influence. He also made some TV dramas.

References:
Interview with him in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 130-3.
Brief profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 200.

The One and the Eight (Film)

Yige he bage. 1983. Dir: Zhang Junzhao. Cinematography: Zhang Yimou.

Context:
Produced at Guangxi Film Studio. Based on an epic poem.


The Film:
This is a film which uses film language (cinematography, framing compositions, depth of field) to get across its meaning - dialogue is often sparse. For instance, in the first act of the film when the nine men are in jail: the 'one' is typically framed on his own (and also asymetrically, not in the centre of the frame) - this is a strong individual assured in his principles despite accusations against him. The 'eight' on the other hand are often cramped together, sometimes as many as 4 or 5 in the same frame - they are a group, a collective, but not a cohesive, unified one, they are essentially a rabble and clearly guilty of the charges against them. The 'one' is thus privileged as the hero of the piece, and his strong individual personality is put to the forefront, while the 'eight' are essentially weak men, confused at best, cowardly at worst. In this simple dichotomy of individual vs. collective, of conformity vs. non-conformity can perhaps be read a radical rejection of fundamental CCP doctrines, or at the very least of the paranoid purges of the Cultural Revolution.
The film, after an opening credits montage with voiceover narration introducing the historical context, begins on a shot of earth before tilting upwards to fill the frame with sky. This cinematography announces Zhang Yimou's style, which he'd use to even greater effect in Yellow Earth, a film in which the visual dichotomy between the land and the heavens plays a major role.


Reception:
The film was met with censorship issues, as the Film Bureau objected to the depiction of the falsely accused Communist officer and his treatment at the hand of his own party. The film was also criticised for supposedly downplaying the role ofthe Communist army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), essentially undermining the romantic myths which the ruling CCP aimed to foster about the past.
Changes were demanded of the film before it could be released, which eventually happened after the release of Yellow Earth - meaning that the latter was the first film to have impact and influence on Chinese film in the '80s. These changes included cuts as well as completely re-shot scenes. The revised version thus altered much of the film's original meaning. Domestically it then went on to some small commercial success, but internationally was banned from export until 1987.

Ni Zhen: "This change [in film style/language] was not an attack on their predecessors, however, but a natural evolutionary consequence of the growing sense of cinematic specificity --- as well as individual identity --- in the 1980s."

References:
Rayns, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 108.
https://cinescopeblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/the-chinese-new-wave-the-one-and-the-eight-1983/

Dai Qing (Domestic Reception)

Born 1941. Prominent Chinese journalist and human rights campaigner, not usually associated with cinema or culture journalism/criticism. However, wrote influential article questioning the authenticity and perhaps the self-orientalism of Raise the Red Lantern. The article was translated into English as 'Raised eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern', and it makes the following points in sharp criticism of the film's content:

• 
  

Raise the Red Lantern (Film)

1991. Dir: Zhang Yimou. Scr:.  Cin: Zhao Fei.

Context:


The Film:


Reception:

• Raise the Red Lantern was one of the rare Chinese films successfullymarketed in America and its success has been ascribed to its exotic formula.
• Zhao Fei won the NSC award in 1992 for his cinematography on this film.
• Criticed by, amongst others, Dai Qing for supposedly pandering to Orientalist tastes. Contesting this kind of critical reception, Rey Chow proposes that they might be better understood in terms of a self-reflexive or 'autoethnographic' gaze. Ethnography is a sociological methodology, involving the mapping of a regional group's social practices and customs, traditionally undertaken by colonial or 'Western' outsiders. Chow suggests that filmmakers like Zhang Yimou have undertaken the role of 'autoethnographers', allowing the Chinese to gaze at themselves at the moment of their international emergence.

References:
https://film110sp12.pbworks.com/w/page/52547203/Color%20and%20Power%20in%20Raise%20the%20Red%20Lantern
http://www.clockwatching.net/~vroom/zyimou.html

Wu Tianming (Director, Industry)

 (1939-2014).
Director associated with the 'Fourth Generation'. Graduated from Beijing FIlm Academy, in late 1970s, but only from one of the intensive short courses open to studio employees.
Born in 1939 in Shaanxi province, north of Xi'an. His father was a Communist Party veteran. Began as an actor in the early 1960s. He moved to directing in 1979, after attending one of the short courses at the BFA. After directing several films there, he was elected to be head at Xi'an Film Studio in late 1983. In this position he would strongly encourage younger talents and act as a mentor-like producer of Fifth Generation films, from 1984 to 1989, where he made it a policy to give opportunities to young directors.
In 1986, he made it studio policy to specialise in what he termed 'westerns', an elastic term standing for any film set in the vast rural provinces of China, anywhere from Tibet in the West to to Yunnan in the South and Xinjiang in the North. The argument went that the bigger city-based studios like Shanghai and Beijing could cover urban films. This therefore gave an official justification for the rural-based films made by Fifth Generation directors, other than the more likely predilection behind it, namely their own pasts as sent-down youths who were relocated to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, Xi'an Film Studio produced such key films by all major directors of the era, such as The Horse Thief, The Black Cannon Incident, King of the Children and Red Sorghum.
His own directorial career, naturally halted like those of other Fourth Generation directors due to their prime years coinciding with the barren era of the Cultural Revolution, was rejuvenated by the influence of the Fifth Generation's innovation and output.
Spent some years between 1989 and 1994 in exile in the US.


References:
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 196.
Rayns, The New Chinese Cinema.

Xi'an Film Studio (Industry)

Based in Xi'an, capital of the Shaanxi province (and birthtown of Zhang Yimou). Founded in 1956.
Under the directorship of Wu Tianming, between 1984 and 1989, it became a fruitful production studio for many young Fifth Generation directors to make their breakthrough. Films produced there include:

• The Black Cannon Incident (1984)
• King of the Children (1987)

References:
http://contemporary_chinese_culture.academic.ru/877/Xi%E2%80%99an_Film_Studio

The Cultural Revolution (Culture/History)

(1966-1976).

May 7 Directive
In a last political gamble to regain power after the failures of the Great Leap Forward, and Liu Shaoqi becoming a threat to his stranglehold on the CCP, on May 7 1966 Mao mobilised his youth paramilitary movement the Red Guards into action, calling for the destruction of anything deemed to be bourgeois, capitalist, traditionalist or Western cultural elements. He also appealed for them to be 'educated' by the peasants by relocating to the countryside. During this period, urban intellectual youths, whose entire lives had been lived under the CCP, were very much ideologically loyal to Mao and the CCP and it was regarded as the highest achievement to be a 'good' CCP activists. Hence (whether out of sincerity or out of wanting to seem active) many of the youths went about putting Mao's rhetoric into practice with tremendous zeal.

The 'zhiqing'
In 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, the relocation of urban youths (Red Guards but also many youths from the cities who had not yet finished secondary school) to the countryside in order to live with the peasants and be 'educated' by them, whilst simultaneously bettering the countryside too (it was also a matter of population reshuffling), started to be enforced compulsorily. These sent-down youths are referred to by the term zhiqing. The policy is sometimes called the 'Down to the countryside' movement or policy. Mao was quoted as saying "The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty."
Many millions (17 million, Cornelius cites), aged 15 to 20, left their homes, families, and lives as university/school students to travel to the countryside as part of this process of 'rural re-education', where they worked with the workers and farmers of rural China. This movement can be seen as part of the recurring cycles of migration and population movement within China and Chinese history, but for this generation of youths (which included most if not all the Fifth Generation directors...) it was a formative and scarring experience. They witnessed realities in rural China which were very different from what their teachers and party officials had taught them. They experienced and lived through hardships alongside a working class people who were not happy under the Communist utopia as had the urban youths had made to believe, but rather were toiling and starving for very little reward other than bare survival. After the Cultural Revolution, a large number of them had no way back into city-life, had to stay in the countryside in poor conditions, were generally root-less, and many others had simply died during their stays. The scars left behind clearly informed and influenced the generation of writers and filmmakers that would break through in the 1980s, including the Scar literature movement, and of course the Fifth Generation directors.


"Most peasants did not welcome these city kids, who competed with them for limited resources despite their lack of basic farming skills. As marginalized individuals in marginalized regions, educated youth in exile were forced to reexamine their cultural center, which had been their home up to this point, as well as their former beliefs, implanted by the official educational system led by the Communist Party." [Lu Tonglin, 15]

Filmic representations

• Chen Kaige's 1987 film King of the Children, based on a novella by Ah Cheng, is directly set during the Cultural Revolution and its 'rural re-education' program.
• To Live ...
• The Blue Kite ...
• Farewell My Concubine ...
• Though I Am Gone (Documentary, 2006)
• Morning Sun (Documentary, 2003)
• Antonioni's Chung Kuo Cina was made during the CR but was strictly monitored by the Chinese government (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mGkGP1NOP0)

Generations of Chinese Cinema (Culture/History)

A categorisation system (generally devised by Chinese critics and historians) used to separate the history of Chinese cinemas into eras or 'generations'. These generations also came to be related with the generations of graduates at the Beijing Film Academy although they do not strictly correlate with every class of generations from there. In particular, the first three 'generations' are taken to split a historical period before the Academy was founded (in 1956), and though there have been more than one group of graduates from there since the 'fifth generation' graduated in 1982, the current era and cinematic movement of contemporary Chinese filmmakers is still called the 'Sixth Generation'. Xie Fei, for example, suggested that the 'Seventh Generation' would occur when Chinese directors could freely making films directly about Mao and his rule without censorship, indicating that they are split as historical labels of key periods.

• First Generation: Those who introduced film into the country and subsequently made films themselves (Zheng Zhenqui, Yang Shichuan).
• Second Generation: Directors who made films before Liberation (1949) and remained active for some time afterwards. 
• Third Generation: Those educated and who joined the film industry during the 17 years 1949-1966 (e.g Xie Jin).
• Fourth Generation: Those who came of age during the CR era but were only able to become filmmakers after it ended.
• Fifth Generation: Like all other educated young people of their age, they had been sent to remote areas of the countryside in the late 1960s, to ‘learn from the people’. The massive heritage of pre-Communist culture was as completely as possible suppressed to them. Tony Rayns writes of this group: "[They] have an impressive range and diversity. But they do have certain underlying elements in common. All of them reject the theatrical conventions that played so large a part in the ‘socialist realism’ tradition. They all minimise dialogue and trust their images to carry the burden of constructing meaning. They deliberately seek out subjects and angles that have been missing from earlier Chinese films… they are founded on a desire to forge a distinctively Chinese cinema, free of Hollywood and Mosfilm influences alike. Most important of all, though, they stand united against didacticism. They interrogate their own themes, and they leave their audiences ample space for reflection. After three decades of ideological certainty in Chinese cinema, they have reintroduced ambiguity…" Also notable trademark is symbolic use of landscape and colour.
• Sixth Generation: adopted a more documentary-style approach partly for aesthetic reasons but also out of the need for secrecy as they started out as an underground (not state-approved) movement. Films were contemporary-set and urban (in contrast to Fifth gen) and typically dealt with disaffected youths.

Of Fifth Generation in the 1990s and following generations: "Increasingly, Fifth Generation filmmakers have relied on foreign investment. While some have hailed them for creating a truly 'transnational' cinema, shaped and determined by myriad global socio-cultural and economic forces, others believe that the need to make films commercially acceptable to foreign financiers and audiences has made it harder to be stylistically and thematically adventurous - a line of attack particularly aimed at Zhang Yimou's films."

On the term 'Fifth Generation' the historian of Chinese film Cheng Jiuha declared:

"The term is inaccurate and inappropriate for these filmmakers. There are a number of filmmakers not included in the generally accepted definition who make films of equally high aesthetic value. Besides, we expect the works of the best directors to span more than a single generation" [asian film industry, 19]

"Facing this new phenomenon, people in Chinese film circles crowned it with a variety of names: 'New Chinese Cinema', 'Chinese Experimental Film', 'Exploration Films'" [asian film industry, 20]

"Despite the inaccuracy of such divisions (Chen Mei insists there are six, not five generations), and the seemingly endless disputes among scholars over the issue, the label 'Fifth Generation' has been so widely accepted that the arguments now seem academic." [asian film industry, 21]

"...the gradual diversification and increasing personalisation of Fifth Generation directors. The Fifth Generation did not form as a collective group with common goals and identical characteristics. There was no common agreement among them. In fact, these young people did communicate much with each other." [asian film industry, 26]

Red Sorghum (Film)

1987. Dir: Zhang Yimou.

Context:

• Zhang speaking about the film: "My personality is quite the contrary to the mood of the film, I have long been repressed, restrained, enclosed and introspective. Once I had a chance to make a film on my own, I wanted to make it liberated, abandoned."
• Yuejin Wang writes: "In the early 1980s, the speculation on the past, on our cultural history, and on the structure of the Chinese mentality, led to a radical change in taste… average theatregoers became fascinated by the charisma of ‘tough guys’ in Japanese and Western movies …Red Sorghum is a cinematic milestone that proposes a powerful Chinese version of masculinity as a means of cultural critique" and "Red Sorghum and many other culturally specific texts do not reflect the appearances of a culture; they mirror what the actual cultural landscape lacks. They reflect fantasies and imagined memories – that which society expels." and "Red Sorghum echoes certain motifs recurrent in the literary ‘search for roots’ that surged in China in the early and middle 80s. Set in an imagined faraway, long ago world where naked human existence is … crude… this new literary genre has as one of its leitmotifs the poetic celebration of masculine potency…. Masculine potency becomes therefore a figure of coming into one’s own being, of spiritual independence of authorial power". These quotes offer up illuminating ways of looking at the films of Zhang, and their perceived over-stylised aesthetics as part of 'fantasies and imagined memories'. A fractured past needs reinventing in order for culture to start again, leading to a real re-evaluation of culture, identity and past. Hence also the connection between this film and the literary root-searching movement, which also tried to look deeper into the past for a revived sense of culture and identity.

The Film:

•  
• Yuejin Wang argues for a gendered reading of the film. Elements based around masculinity are described above, while the early red sedan scene is argued to be shot from a 'female gaze' perspective with Gong Li's character checking out the male kidnapper's body and the camera following her gaze in POV.

Reception:

• Distribution: New Yorker (US theatrical and home video, 1988)
• The film had a controversial reception in China, where it was seen as too coarse and unrestrained (in its depictions of illicit sex, forwardness, violence…) and lacking in traditional Confucian values of restraint. This implies certain sections of the domestic audience saw it as 'un-Chinese'.
• 
  

References:

Yuejin Wang essay in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema.

Yellow Earth (Film)

Huang tudi. 1984. Dir: Chen Kaige. Scr: Zhang Ziliang. Cin: Zhang Yimou.

Context:

• Produced at Guangxi Film Studio after Chen asked to be transferred there to work with his friend Zhang Yimou, it was Chen's first feature film.
• Based on essay 'Echo in the Valley' by Ke Lan. This was a musical paean to the government and people, with a stereotypical story of an Eighth Route Army soldier bettering the life of a peasant girl by influencing her to struggle from the feudal traditions of her family (thereby emancipating her). The musical element in the film (i.e. the folk songs and recurring musical scenes of Cuiqiao's melancholy song over the river, overseen by pre-eminent composer Zhao Jiping) must be seen as stemming from this source, although it had no specific reference to the Northern China setting of Yellow Earth. A number of melodramatic and political clichés were dropped by Chen in his adaptation, which initially went under the working title 'Silent is the Ancient Plain', before the colour tones of the final result inspired a name-change.
• The film is a deconstruction of Communist mythology and propaganda: namely that their message spread like wildfire in the countryside, with peasants instantly being enthusiastic, as if the CCP and their message had a natural bond with them. The reality in Yellow Earth is shown to be vastly different, and the difficulties in bringing the Communist message to uneducated illiterate peasants, who are culturally steeped in ancient Confucianist beliefs and traditions, are shown to be deeply complicated.
• Chen, Zhang Yimou and other crew members scouted Shaanxi province, lived there with peasants for a month, and in the final film would recruit plenty of actual peasants and locals to star in roles or as extras. They would also include plenty of local 'colour', in the form of Shaanxi folk songs (xintianyou) and folk rituals. This would give the film an anthropological, documentary-esque film, although this was frowned upon by the official regime's views, presumably because they saw the film's portrayal of the rural population as clashing against their own propaganda of how they had made the peasants progressive and improved their lives.
• Technically the second 'Fifth Generation' film, it represents their efforts to disown and distance themselves from what came before them: propaganda films, didacticism, aged melodramatic styles. Chen Kaige said in an interview with Tony Rayns: "[The Fifth Generation graduates] shared two convictions: first, the older generation of Chinese filmmakers could be dismissed as propagandists, and second, film was an artistic medium that should be used personally. All of us hated what was passing for cinema in China – all that didacticism, all those dated, theatrical styles – and we set out determined to do something different and better." Such claims clearly sound like the words of a new generation of filmmakers starting what could be termed unde the label of 'new wave', as a cinematic movement.
• True to the Fifth Generation's ambitions to make a type of cinema completely different from previous Chinese films, its style and treatment of its content is very different to what came before in many respects. For instance, when compared with the many post-1949 films depicting feudal marriages, Yellow Earth can be seen as making a subtle comment on these films and their appropriation of such rituals for political rhetoric. E.g. Paul Clark states that one stock character from the 'model opera' type films during the C.R. was a "young woman eager to join the revolutionary struggle". Yellow Earth subverts this stock character.
• Like several other 1980s Fifth Generation films, it was shot in rural locations, specifically in the Shaanxi province just like Tian Zhuangzhuang's On the Hunting Ground, made the same year. Part of this interest with rural locales could be down to the directors' own experiences as zhiqing during the Cultural Revolution, to the greater ease and freedom (from the censorship and control of central regulations) they could enjoy working in such remote settings, and to bring to provide a cinematic portrait of/voice to some of the ethnic minorities of China.

The Film:

• Set in 1939, during the Sino-Japanese war (just as The One and the Eight had been, presumably because it is a safer era to touch on than any CCP era), in the rural parts Shaanxi province, with its parched yellow-ochre earth and by the banks of the Yellow River and also famously where Mao set up base after the Long March. Lao Gu (Wang Xueqi) is an Eighth Route Army (CCP) soldier on a mission to collate folk songs from the local peasants, in order to then turn them into Communist propaganda songs; it would both boost morales for the troops and presumably the goal is to also boost CCP support amidst these peasants. During this time Lao Gu is being housed by a poor family of farmers: a widower (Tan Tuo), his teenage daughter Cuiqiao (Xue Bai) and his young son Hanhan (Liu Qiang). The film however does not focus very much at all on Lao Gu's mission, or even that much on Lao Gu himself. Lao Gu as a central character works more as a focal and observational device, being our witness and guide to this harsh rural and feudal world (it must be noted that he has clearly far more modern values, as seen explicitly in his conversation with Cuiqiao's father concerning marriage). Lao Gu's role, as a relatively educated character from the city, sent to the rural backwards countryside in interaction with uneducated farmers/peasants, is easily read as a stand-in for the situations the zhiqing found themselves (including of course Chen himself the Yellow River. These traits should be seen as an attempt to directly and distinctly move away from the previous cinematic tropes of didacticism and melodrama.
• The parallels and contrasts between the film's two paternal figure - girl relationships (i.e. Father with Cuiqiao, and Lao Gu with Cuiqiao - representing respectively the relationship with/impact on of traditional confucianism and of communism on the population, both being impotent in improving lives) are key to its structure and meaning.
• Lao Gu's ineptitude and incapability to create any positive change to the fate of Cuiqiao (besides indirectly influencing her, he can do nothing as he cannot help her join the army before her marriage) can be seen as a reversal of the official version, where these peasants' lives were radically improved by the CCP and its soldiers.
• Aesthetic influences from pre-CCP classical culture: Its visual aspects and cinematography attempt to form a distinctly Chinese filmic language (as opposed to more conventional Western narrative filmic visual tropes) [c.f. Rey Chow describing the film's central dilemma as wanting to describe and comment on China with a technological medium and artform which the filmmakers were aware was 'non-Chinese' --- i.e. a cultural exchange of film technology and national culture]. In particular, the film has drawn comparisons to the non-perspectival tradition of Chinese scroll painting (long-shots of landscapes with dwarfed human figures, pans and tilts like the opening of scrolls, empty space, disproportionate horizons in the composition, etc), and to Taoist school of thought (the use of landscape is reminiscent of the Taoist dictum 'Silent is the Roaring Sound, Formless is the Image Grand'). From 'New Chinese Cinemas':"Yellow Earth’s reinsertion of nature into the coded semiotic system of Chinese film syntax, its reinterpretation of landscape and its strategy of emptying space constitute… the Daoist terms for the political reinstatement of a classical mode of the Chinese aesthetics". The peasants have a deep respect and understanding of nature (c.f. the father's respect for the land by ritually sprinkling grain on the revered yellow earth, which Gu laughs at and sees as supersition --- to him the earth is merely raw material to be exploited just like the folk songs are to the CCP, but to the peasants who work it, it offers livelihood and deserves deep respect, as do the folk songs --- and Yellow Earth also reflects that respect for both the earth and the folk songs and traditions) which fits with the Daoist view of harmonious order between man and nature.
• Zhang Yimou's cinematography, filmed on location, uses natural lighting and non-perspectival use of space to depict barren landscape in extreme long shots (with human figures as tiny dots in the distance). The horizon is very often oddly proportioned, positioned at the very top or very bottom of the frame, with the majority of the frame then being made up of earth/landscape or of sky. This leaves a lot of 'empty space' in the compositions, which traditionally feature in Chinese classical painting and is regarded as just as important as anything else in the painting.
• Visual symbolism of having to go against the current (non-conformity) occurs with Cuiqiao's escape in the river against the water's current and also at the very end with Hanhan running inthe opposite direction of the mass, when he sees Lao Gu.
• The intermittent shots of Cuiqiao watching on, during the first wedding procession, intercut 3 or 4 times into scenes of the festivities, have added resonance due to the Confucian teaching inscribed on the door behind her. The Chinese characters visible mean 'Three obediences and four virtues', referring to the Confucian principles, where the three obediences are a woman's obedience to father, husband and son. Of course these shots also foreshadow the second wedding procession sequence, which will be Cuiqiao's wedding.
• The rural peasants of the film have no time for CCP ideals or indeed ideals of any kind, since they are far more preoccupied with survival on a day-to-day basis. No collective farming is ever shown in the film, instead we see lone farmers with an ox and a trough, representing an age-old agrarian sensibility.
• Self-referentiality: (like Chen's King of the Children) the soldier Gu and his effort at making change, is a stand-in not only for Chen's experiences as a sent-down youth but for the artist trying to change the fate of the masses of peasants as per Mao's instructions for art/artists at the influential Yan'an conference. In the end both the efforts of Gu and of art are well-intentioned but futile, and Yellow Earth itself is self-reflexively inserting it and its filmmakers in the role of Gu. Just like usurping the folk songs for propaganda is doomed to fail, so is hoping that songs/art can improve the lives of the peasants, contrary to what the idealistic Gu at the beginning says to his peasant hosts at the wedding banquet. [See Helen Hok-Sze essay in Chinese Films in Focus for more on this]
• Folk elements, rituals and local colour: 

1. The folk songs (xintianyou of Shaanxi province), bitter and lamenting, songs of oppression and hardship, sung variously by the man at the wedding banquet, Cuiqiao several times (each intercut with shots of the river long-shots of nature) and one time by Cuiqiao's father (c.f. what Helen Hok-Sze writes of this instance, which demonstrates that the father is not as simple-minded as Gu and perhaps we the audience might have assumed.He is not unsympathetic towards his daughter's fate but knows he cannot change it. He sings now for Gu because, though he knows his song-collecting project is bound to fail, he still wishes to help him avoid trouble with his superiors.)  
2. The rain dance..
3. The waist-drum performance....
4. The wedding ceremonies.... 

• The film can overall be said to have three major aims: 1) to investigate and perhaps create cultural and historical meaning (a look at rural folk culture and back in Chinese history, much obfuscated by propaganda, also an attack on feudal and Confucianist patriarchical traditions which imprison these otherwise lively peasants full of vitaly); 2) to attempt to move away from the didactical unambiguous discourse of social propaganda by introducing some uncertainty and opening up questions; 3) to give a platform and voice to specifically Chinese aesthetics.

Reception:

• Distribution: International Film Circuit (US theatrical, 1988); Fox Lorber (US VHS, 1997)
• Famously premiered at the 1985 Hong Kong film festival, on 12 April 1985, where its screening was met with much 'collective rapture' and the audience stayed for a long time afterwards in a post-screening discussion with Chen and Zhang, both in attendance. Although most of the audience were from Hong Kong (thereby people who generally would have low expectations of mainland China art/culture but who were shocked by the quality of the film), there were enough foreign journalists and critics (including of course Tony Rayns) present to report back to the West and garner the film's acclaim and international attention. It was hailed as a 'bold breakthrough' and as an 'exploration of film language'. It won five festival prizes in 1985, in China, in Hawaii, in Locarno, in Spain and a prize for cinematography at the Three Continents festival at Nantes. It also sparked a great deal of debate within China amongst critics and scholars.
• Within China, the official views towards it were suspicious, due to its seeming subtle reversals of the official story of the CCP bettering the peasants lives then (in 1939) and of possessing high quality of life now (bearing in mind that the film makes extensive use of local peasants as actors and of local rituals and location settings). They were also not keen on the 'ethnocentric' 'celebration' of 'poverty' and 'backwardness'. However the film was not banned by the Film Bureau, probably largely thanks to its ambiguity as well as the success of its premiere at the Hong Kong festival which prompted the regime to modify their initial reactions, presumably because they felt they could instead turn its international reputation to their advantage. Tony Rayns has written: "Yellow Earth was received with considerable hostility by the older members of the film establishment, but its triumph at the 1985 Hong Kong Film Festival (with a 99 per cent Chinese audience) meant that it could not be dismissed as an aberration. In the film press and among the jury for the annual ‘Golden Rooster Awards’, the film was attacked for being obscure, incomprehensible and above the heads of the mass audience; the filmmakers were also accused of trying to deal with a subject they were too young to know anything about." Rayns in a contemporary Time Out 1986 wrote: "Yellow Earth has ruffled feathers in China partly because it doesn't look, sound or behave like other Chinese movies"
• Older, more conservative members of the film establishment received it with considerable hostility. In the film press and among the jury for the annual ‘Golden Rooster Awards’, the film was attacked for being obscure, incomprehensible and above the heads of the mass audience; the filmmakers were also accused of trying to deal with a subject they were too young to know anything about.
• One could certainly say, as Rayns and Yau suggest, that Western audiences enjoyed this film more for its exquisite visuals than for its politics. Indeed, to a Western audience, the vast 'empty' landscapes of this rural peasant land could signify a nostalgic return to a simpler pre-industrial bygone age. It also opens up questions which recur for many rural-set world cinema films in their international reception, which ask whether Western audiences (perhaps subconsciously) prefer to see such films because they exoticise their third world 'others', as opposed to show some urban metropolis similar to their own.
• Hence accusations of this film, and other contemporary new wave films, of being 'un-Chinese'. Read for instance the translated essay by the older director Wu Yiqong, warning against films being too experimental and esoteric and driving audiences away. ("I want to be a Chinese artist, and not a foreign artist or an artist enslaved to foreigners. Without Chinese national characteristics, how can something become international? If a film can’t be understood by the Chinese people, how can it achieve international affirmation?") But do these films not have Chinese characteristics? Is it right for them to be judged by box office revenue, when [to a large extent] the opening up of Chinese cinemas to foreign imports meant domestic urban audiences wanted something else.
• To some foreign critics, it was misconstrued as simplistic CP-dictated propaganda, example.
• In the opinion of Tian Zhuangzhuang, the film was a pioneering work that paved the way for him and others.

References:
Rayns in Time Out, 1986.
Rayns in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema.
Wu Yiqong translated essay in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema.
Yau in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 62-.
Hok-Sze in Chinese Films in Focus.
Cornelius in New Chinese Cinema.