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:

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• 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'.
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References:

Yuejin Wang essay in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema.