Chakushin ari (One Missed Call, Japan, 2003)

Don't take the call!

Genres are, by their nature, formulaic however new examples of the genre need to be different otherwise audiences, having seen it all before, will ‘turn off’. One Missed Call is a Ringu rip-off, instead of video tapes and a week to live, the hapless victims receive a mobile phone call – uncannily from themselves – from a day or two in the future were they get to hear their last words. Then someone else in that person’s ‘contacts’ receives a call.

There is very little difference from Ringu, and other examples of J-horror: the emphasis on school girls; the useless cops; the slightly older man who tries to help; disturbing young children; long hair witches-ghosts; brilliant set pieces… And that’s why One Last Call is worth watching, for despite it’s overlong near-two hour length, there are many genuinely chilling moments. J-horror directors relish placing something uncanny in the mise en scene without drawing attention to it. So a routine search of an abandoned flat suddenly becomes creepy as you think, ‘Are those fingers sticking out of that cupboard on the wall?’ You look ‘closer’ to realise the bloody witch is in there.

Directed by the incredibly prolific Takeshi Miike (80 films in under 20 years), One Last Call is a worthy entrant to the J-horror cycle. Wonderfully composed shots – how the hell does he do that when directing four films a year?! – and a genuinely scary finale offers a satisfyingly cold-sweaty experience.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom, S.Korea, 2008)

The good, the weird, the bad

This is undoubtedly the funniest film I’ve seen in a long time. It stars the man with the maddest hair in contemporary cinema, Song Kang-ho, and  has some of the best action sequences in any western. Clearly a homage to Leone’s spaghetti westerns the visual style, as you expect, is stunning but director Kim Ji-woon (also A Bittersweet Life, 2005, and A Tale of Two Sisters, 2003), fills the mise en scene with fabulous detail that complements Song’s ‘hamming’ comedy. In one shoot out he wears a deep sea diver’s helmet, in another he’s on a motorbike being chased by a bounty hunter, two bandit gangs and the Japanese army. If Kim does throw in the kitchen sink, it’s also followed by kitchen utensils and they don’t land in a random heap but it a carefully composed film.

Like Tears of the Black Tiger (Thailand, 2000), Good-Bad-Weird delights in virtuoso camerawork but while I did get bored by the former, Kim’s movie never palls and I look forward to seeing it again to appreciate the tremendously fluid camera movement, and the actors’ movements in the frame. The use of colour is, like Black Tiger, utterly stunning. But what shines out is Song’s comic timing, seen also in The Host (2006) and Memories of Murder (2003); from his furtive glance around him as if everyone is listening to him to his hapless attempt to escape where he’s asked if he’s attempting to escape (he says, ‘No,’); the guy is a comic genius.

According to Sight & Sound this is the most expensive Korean movie every made. I not sure it’s about anything, the plot is built around a treasure map and Korean independence from Japan, but with such fabulous film-making that doesn’t matter.

Mongol (Kazakhstan/Mongolia/Russia/Germany 2007)

Asano Tadanobu as Temudjin – eventually to become Genghis Khan

I wish I’d seen this on its theatrical release in the UK last year. Watching it on DVD recently I was impressed on many levels and not least by the fantastic images of landscapes in Kazakhstan and China. I confess that when the film was released I assumed that it was simply another East Asian epic martial chivalry film. In a way, it is, but it’s also something different. I wasn’t expecting it to be concerned only with the beginning of the story of the Great Khan and I hadn’t taken on board the complex institutional context of the film’s production.

Mongol is truly a ‘global film’ sitting alongside Ang Lee’s films made in China. Veteran Russian director Sergei Bodrov was born in Khabarovsk, the main city of the Russian ‘Far East’ and close to the border with China. In Mongol he has made a film about the 13th century conqueror of half the ‘known world’ – a story which begins a thousand miles to the West (there is a detailed plot outline on Wikipedia). The two main actors in the film are Japanese and Chinese. It was shot by a Dutchman and a Russian and edited by an Icelander and an American with production design, sound and other roles shared by Russians, Chinese and Germans (the very large team is described on the ‘making of’ DVD film as “300 Chinese and 100 Russians”). There are two Russian and two German companies listed and the film appears to have been shot on location in Kazakhstan and Inner Mongolia (part of China) on a budget of around $20 million. I don’t really understand how ‘Mongolia’ gets included in ‘Country of Origin’ apart from the fact that most of the rest of the cast are Mongolian non-professionals. (For Academy Award purposes, the film was nominated as from Kazakhstan.)

There was a documentary construction of ‘known’ historical events on UK television a few years ago, so I wasn’t too surprised by the events depicted. Bodrov is quoted on Wikipedia as explaining that although Mongolian history wasn’t written down, he has used a Chinese account of Mongolian oral tales as the basis for the story – adding some of his own creative touches. The Americans seem to get very excited about the authenticity of these historical epics and some have objected to the new image of Genghis Khan. I’m not so bothered myself as the stereotypical reference to anything fascistic as “to the right of Genghis Khan” is not very helpful. The only real difficulty I had with the events depicted was that the director is quite fond of fades to black between scenes and that sometimes it was difficult to tell how much time had passed. This is compounded by the casting of Asano (very good) as a young man who must then age. Unless I’ve misunderstood the story, he is meant to be in his late teens or early twenties and should really have been played by another actor before Asano took the role over with Temudjin in his 30s.

There were obviously some difficulties over language amongst the crew and because Asano had to learn to speak Mongolian. Overall I don’t think this matters unless you know Mongolian. Visually it seems to me that the different facial features don’t matter either since this area of North Eastern Asia must have experienced considerable mixing of peoples anyway. The non-professional (Khulan Chuluun, a student journalist) who plays Börte, wife of Temudjin, is astonishingly beautiful.

But it was the landscape that really got to me. At times I was taken back to many Hollywood westerns, especially those dealing with the early wagon trains or with Native American life. I was reminded of some of the paintings of the American West – of the great plains with the mountains in the distance. And then I remembered the handful of Russian films I’ve seen depicting the steppes. I must go back and look at Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (USSR 1966) which I think has scenes depicting Tatar raids on Russia. For sheer spectacle though, the film I was most reminded of was Miklós Jancsó’s The Red and the White (Hungary/USSR 1967), a highly stylised film with fantastic long shots of groups of men on horseback. These films were set on the western edges of the Central Asian steppes which stretch thousands of miles east. For someone used mainly to the pocket -sized hills and dales of West Yorkshire, the steppes are very exotic.

I’m looking forward to part 2 of this story of Genghis Khan which is announced for 2010.

Hadaka no shima (The Naked Island, Japan, 1960)

A Sisyphean task

Although this film (inevitably) reminds me of others it also seems unique. There’s no dialogue, there are a few songs and plenty of sound, and nothing happens until 28 minutes into the film. By that I mean, there’s no sense of a narrative ‘problem’ until then. This happening? A bucket of water is dropped. And it’s not a ‘narrative problem’ in the normal sense; the ‘disruption’ is the characters’ whole existence. But dropping the water  is a ‘big deal’ as it has to be carried up a hill (above) having been transported from another island:

The Naked Island can be regarded as an oblique representation of hibakusha cinema in the endless toiling of a seemingly inutile, barren land: a bittersweet, poetic elegy for Shindo’s dying ancestral vocation on a rural, isolated island. (Aquarello, 2006)

It reminded me most of Terra trema (Italy, 1948), a neo realist film portraying existence on an inhospitable island. Unlike the neo realist films, Shindo Kaneto directs in a highly stylised fashion with a beautifully composed Cinemascope and monochrome mise en scene. This stylisation seemed to me to be slightly ‘at odds’ with the, at times, brutal life portrayed. It seemed that the film was celebrating the ‘close to hostile nature’ life of the protagonists; however, it isn’t quite that simple.

Asiexpo Festival 2008

 

Cho Min-sik gets an award

Review of Asiexpo 2008 by Leung Wing-Fai

In years to come, I’ll be asked where I was when Obama was elected the first African-American president of the US and I shall recall Asiexpo (4-9 November 2008). I did hope that was not the only reason I would remember the festival. Asiexpo is a small collection of films, documentaries and other cultural activities in Lyon that celebrates all things Asian (given this is France, Asia doesn’t just mean the Indian subcontinent). This year was its 14th edition. Most of the films in competition were independent, rarely seen and edgy titles. They were complemented with anime, the odd commercial features and retrospectives. This year saw ‘Bollywood Story: Panorama of Indian Cinema 1949-2008′ and ‘Homage to Choi Min-sik’, the Korean actor most known for his role as the lead in Old Boy. Before you get excited, I missed Mr. Choi as he arrived the day I left. However, the loss was compensated by smaller gems.

US trained Lee Sang-woo’s debut feature Tropical Manila (South Korea/Philippines 2008) shows great promise. Set in a slum in Manila, a Korean fugitive waits for the day he can return to his native country especially since his mother is dying from cancer. The interconnected yet strained lives of the man, his Filipino wife and ‘Kopino’ son Philip are fascinating. The visceral, sexually charged and violent film is repulsive and poetic at the same time. Lee’s aesthetics are clean but vibrant: you can almost smell the Philippines through the images. It comes to no surprise that Lee was apprentice to Kim Ki-duk.

Tropical Manila

Feast of Villains (Pan Jianlin 2008, China) is a realist depiction of a poor young man from Beijing duped by an illegal organ donation ring. Technically naïve though socially significant, the film can be accused of perpetuating the stereotypes of the evil ‘Southerners’ that are often seen in the popular imagery of mainland literature and cinema. Vermillion Souls (Iwana Masaki 2008) is an oddity. Debut direction by a 63 year-old Butoh master now settled in France, the film is more experiential than narrative, and a philosophical contemplation about death, weaving between dream and reality and witnessed by a seven year-old boy. The actors are fellow Butoh dancers and their performance is often physical and lyrical, betraying the theatrical origin of the filmmakers.

It was great to revisit such a Bollywood classic as Mangala (Mehboob Khan 1952) not least because of it glamorous lead Nadira. Nadira was an Iraq-born actress of Jewish descent (at the time, it was still quite a taboo for Indian women to appear onscreen). Her rise to fame was due to her depiction of unusually strong female roles. Dil Se (Mani Ratnam 1998) proved to be more popular amongst the diaspora (such as in the UK) than in India perhaps due to its unconventional subject matter (separatist movement, terrorism) and ending. It now gets regular screenings on Channel 4 late at night and is well worth checking out.

You can imagine my relief to see Tokyo Gore Police (Nishimura Yoshihiro 2008) after several days of heavy subjects including human rights, sex tourism, suicide bombing and organ trade. TGP is what it says on the tin: wall to wall gore, a so-called police force led by Eihi Shiina from Audition, set in futuristic Tokyo. You don’t get murder weapons as subtle as needles here though: we are talking about severed limbs turning into chain saws and giant claws, and geysers of blood. I can’t wait for the sequel!

Asiexpo is small, bijoux and Francophile. Apart from one or two titles, all the films were subtitled in French only, hence the slight lack of international presence. One small gripe I had was the disorganisation, especially long queues and problems with subtitles. Considering the festival was run by volunteers (who were all trés gentils by the way), we had to make allowances. I met someone in Lyon who asked if Obama would really make a difference. Has Asiexpo got a part to play in the Asian cinema landscape? Well, it is more like one small step towards change . . .

Thanks to Asiexpo, Lee Sang-woo and Iwana san.

Spider Lillies (Ci qing, Taiwan 2007)

Isabella Leong (left) as Takeko and Rainie Yang as Jade in Spider Lilies

Spider Lilies was shown in the UK as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on tour (following an awards win at Berlin). The two central characters are Jade, a young woman who makes a living as a ‘web-cam girl’, performing for online punters in her room, and an older young woman Takeko, who runs her own tattoo parlour. Both the women have difficult family histories. Jade lives with her grandma (who occasionally wanders in front of the web-cam) and Takeko has a younger brother who is now in a care home after being traumatised by witnessing his father’s death during an earthquake. Mothers are absent. The plot sees Jade deciding that she needs a tattoo. When she visits Takeko’s parlour she sees the striking image of spider lilies (which have legendary status in local folklore). She also recognises Takeko as the older girl with whom she fell in love as a 9 year-old. Will the two women get together again after ten years? What do you think?

There are two subplots concerning weak young men (the brother is a third weak young man). One character is a narcissistic would-be hoodlum who attempts to extort money from other youths in order to get more tattoos from Takeko and the other is a shy young policeman who is supposed to be collecting evidence about Jade’s online activities.

I’d hoped to discover new young talents here and there are some pluses. Both the leads give engaging performances (one is a Taiwanese pop and TV star, the other an experienced Hong Kong film star/model), the music is good and I liked the presentation of the rather gaudy world of the internet and tattoos. But the only narrative sequence that really interested me was the online seduction of Jade performed in parallel by Takeko and the policeman, both using pseudonyms. It’s already a cliche of course, but I found it engaging and intriguing.

The film opens very slowly and as I was very tired I found it difficult to concentrate and to absorb narrative information – I may well have missed things (e.g. I think Takeko’s mother was Japanese and that she went to live in Japan, but I might have got that wrong). The second half moves more quickly, but I found the sub-plots ludicrous, the editing clumsy and the insertion of some special effects ham-fisted. My companion suggested that there was probably a good short film here that was unadvisedly allowed to expand far beyond what the story idea merited.

The major audience issue, I presume, for the lesbian audience is how well the relationship is portrayed. Lesbianism is still largely a taboo subject in some East Asian cultures (in Korea, for instance, where the film has an 18 certificate and presumably in Singapore where it is R21 according to IMDB). It seems to me that there is not enough of the relationship on screen and that the sex is handled very discreetly (seems coy to a Western viewer). Perhaps it is the social situation which attracts lesbian audiences? The IMDB comments seem very divided as to whether the film works. Some mention other East Asian films for comparison. Of these, I would recommend Memento Mori (South Korea 1999) as far more interesting. Having said that, I would certainly consider watching the next venture by the creative talents on Spider Lilies (director Zero Chou, writer Singing Chen and stars, Rainie Yang and Isabella Leong). By then, the writer and director might have tightened up their act. I may be being a little harsh in saying this and there is an interesting interview with Singing Chen, who directed Bundled (Wo jiao A-Ming la, Tawan 2000), on the World Socialist Website from 2000. It’s also the case that the director Zero Chou is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker and that Spider Lilies is her fourth fiction feature. See Wikipedia. So, perhaps Spider Lilies was just a slip-up?

Far East Film Festival 9

Report by Leung Wing-Fai

Memories of Matsuko (Japan 2006) — a “tragic comedy with a life-affirming message”.

At Far East Film Festival, Udine, Italy this year, I was disappointed once again (see in the picture issue 54). In four days, I watched 14 films, 1 television drama, walked out of 8 screenings (a personal record) and could not finish one title. First impressions: the mainland Chinese outputs seem to be moving towards the commercial mainstream; Hong Kong cinema continues to decline; the results of effort to generate Asian blockbusters are mixed; Korean titles are steady, solid productions but fail to impress. There was only one retrospective this year, of Patrick Tam, one of the most underrated directors from the Hong Kong New Wave. I was glad to revisit his early works, as well as see After This Our Exile (2006), his first film after fifteen years. Even the general atmosphere of the festival was a little subdued: only on 25 April (Italy’s National holiday) was there a sell out (for the unfortunately lame sequel to Nana, Kentaro Otani, 2005, see below). Having said that, FEFF is still the prime promoter of Asian film culture in Europe and the debates in and around the main venue Teatro Nuovo carried on in its lively tradition. For itp readers I shall examine Asian commercial cinema, including co-productions and blockbusters, and genre films.

The national selections reflect the respective commercial health of the industries. China reportedly produced over 300 films in 2006 (153 releases). Censorship seems to have been relaxed in order to allow for more realistic and popular themes to emerge. The Matrimony (Teng Huatao, 2007) was the first officially passed story involving supernatural elements, disguised as a ‘ghost-melodrama’ where one side of the love triangle is a dead girlfriend. In China, domestic films took 55% of total box office (FEFF 2007: 25) which is a sure sign that the Chinese industry is one to watch. With the continuous decline in the number of productions from Hong Kong (50 in 2006), the film industry relies on co-productions, most notably, with China, Japan and Korea. In March, the city hosted the first Pan-Asian film awards, alongside existing ventures such as the Asian Film Financing Forum, a step closer to the dream of region-wide cinema. Confession of Pain (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2006, the team behind Infernal Affairs) is a suitably convoluted thriller though the performance lacks charisma (main cast includes Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro); its glossy, high value production does not hide the dull blockbuster formula. Apparently, Confession has already been sold to the production team behind The Departed and another inferior remake is expected. Sakuran (photographer-turned-director Ninagawa Mika, Japan, 2007) travels in the opposite direction: a Memories of Geisha cloned, deliberately colourful, inauthentic tale of an oiran (high class prostitute) set in the Edo period. The combination of good visual elements and inappropriate choice of score of cheesy western pop, J-pop, jazz does not detract from a flimsy narrative.

In 2006, Japanese films took just over half of the domestic box office; South Korea also had 60% market share (FEFF 2007: 37, 53). Apart from Hong Kong, on paper at least, East Asian cinemas seem to be relatively healthy. It is a tad worrying if the offering at this year’s festival is an accurate reflection of the commercial outputs from the various Asian film industries. The Hong Kong-China co-production Battle of Wits (Jacob Cheung 2006) turns out to be a dull CGI epic that plays (sic) like an annoying computer war game, one over which the audiences do not have any control. Death Note, a Warner Brothers release, and its sequel (based on Ohba Tsugumi manga, both directed by Shusuke Kaneko, Japan, 2006) also fall under this category of ‘joystick-less game-film monstrosity’. The story is an unnecessarily complex psychological battle between a student-killer and detective, featuring CGI egos (one of them looks like David Bowie, which freaked me out). Another spectacular failure is Dynamite Warriors (Chalerm Wongpim, Thailand, 2006). Obviously trying to capture the post-Ong Bak market, it attempts to combine far too many, annoying computer-generated fight scenes with an Indiana Jones type character (an almost entirely silent Tony Jaa clone). One lesson from all these is that computer imagery helps and enhances the narrative but does not compensate for poor script and the lack of rounded characters.

Genre films, once the speciality of industries such as Hong Kong, are now a firm tradition in South Korea. The most impressive is The Host (Bong Joon-ho 2006), about a sea monster holding a couple of children hostage, hotly pursued by an anxious, eccentric family. It has high production value, featuring the best of monster flicks from Hollywood (quality special effects) and Japan (Godzilla-style villain and the quintessential family in peril). After its disappointing cinema release in the UK, this film is now enjoying a good reception on DVD. Elsewhere, Asian horror fails to recapture the fresh surprises of several years ago. This year’s horror day featured the likes of Chermin (Zarina Abdullah, Malaysia, 2007) and The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Koji Shiraishi, Japan, 2007), low budget films with standard tropes (e.g. vengeful female ghosts) that fail to break new grounds.

The titles that I was most impressed with this year were genre-defiling drama. Soi Cheang’s Dog Bite Dog (Hong Kong, 2006), an extremely dark thriller, contains an element of male melodrama. Memories of Matsuko (Tetsuya Nakashima, Japan 2006) is the epic life story of the eponymous downtrodden, unfortunate heroine. Nakashima, a former commercial director (evident from this and his previous film Kamikaze Girls, 2004), manages to use highly stylised, technicoloured, MTV imagery to convey some very dark materials in a tragic comedy, that at the same time has a life affirming message. Cruel Winter Blues (Lee Jung-bum, Korea, 2006) turns the gangster movie, by now a familiar Korean standard, on its head when the protagonist (a great performance from Sul Kyoung-gu of Peppermint Candy and Public Enemy fame) stakes out at his rival gang member’s mother’s roadside café and develops a relationship with her. The result is a drama that grabs you quietly and questions the meaning of violence and the so called gangster ethic. As such, breaking generic iconography could be interesting but other attempts seem forced: Righteous Ties (Jang Jin, South Korea, 2006) offers a good first half gangster-prison-comedy, followed by a familiar overblown, overlong Korean finale.

2006 might not have been a vintage year for East Asian cinemas, although the film industries still held out against foreign (mainly Hollywood) films. Formulaic films in Japan turned audiences off: a good example during the festival was Nana 2 (Kentaro Otani 2006), a lukewarm manga-adapted-rom-com sequel. Despite the number of productions and good domestic market shares for China, Korea and Japan, many commercial films are too eager to repeat existing formulas and rely on technology to hide weak story and character development. Asian horror and Hallyu (Korean wave) are on the wane. Foreign sales for South Korean titles have dropped. The surprises have come from directors not afraid to stick to an uncompromising vision, engaging scripts, aided by good actors (that East Asia has plenty of) and appropriate visual style and score.

Reference
Far East Film Festival (FEFF) (2007) Catalogue Udine, Italy: CEC

Thanks to Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche for my attendance at Far East Film 9 and Ben Heal for additional ideas.

Yellow Earth (China 1984)

The soldier is out of place in the village.

Yellow Earth was one of the most important films to appear in the 1980s, not just in China, but in the whole of global cinema. When it was released in the UK in 1986 it had an immediate impact and was recognised as one of the few films to be marked by a genuine attempt to create a ‘new’ kind of cinema. For the UK audience this was very much concerned with the cinematic qualities of the film – its use of colour, composition and framing and its use of sound to evoke an ‘unknown’ time and place. A similar response met Souleymane Cissé’s 1987 Malian film Yeelen which presented a different but related view of a sub-Saharan African culture. A further similarity between these two films is the background of their creative forces – filmmakers educated and trained in the context of European film culture, who then turn to their own traditional cultures to find stories to tell and an aesthetic through which to realise their vision.

All the Western scholars referenced here are agreed on the importance of the ‘auterist vision’ adopted by the trio of Beijing Film Academy graduates, director Chen Kaige, cinematographer Zhang Yimou and production designer He Qun. Where previous creative teams thought to realise Chinese films using a conventional mode of representation developed from the 1930s through the 1950s (Stage Sisters being a good example of such an approach), the Fifth Generation filmmakers on Yellow Earth looked to the traditions of Chinese painting and folksongs for a suitable aesthetic to convey a story that was also ‘different’ in its concerns. Although taken from a novel, the ideas contained in Yellow Earth were thoroughly re-worked for a film produced by the young filmmakers from their base in Guangxi, far from Beijing in Southern China. They travelled north to shoot on location and drew on a range of specifically local influences.

The ‘look’ of the film
Yellow Earth is set in Northern China on the Loess Plateau of Shanbei in Shaanxi province, where the soil is the result of a wind-blown fine silt carried to the region from the plains of Central Asia. The landscape is constantly being sculpted by wind and water erosion, producing deep gorges. Not only is the earth yellow, but the area is also traversed by the Yellow River – one of the major river systems of China. Zhang Yimou was born in the region and he went to great lengths to represent it on film – shooting at particular times of day to capture the range of yellows, ochres and browns in the soil. Traditional painting styles used bold colours and Yellow Earth also includes what have now become the almost trademark vivid reds of Zhang Yimou – all the more startling against the austere backdrops.

The framings frequently use the horizon line to comment on the importance to the characters of their environment. In a conventional landscape framing the horizon line might be place somewhere in the central third of the image, but Zhang pushes it further towards the top or bottom of the frame.

The compositions in Yellow Earth draw upon traditional modes of Chinese painting, especially those of the Shanbei region which see single human figures or trees, or small groups, set against the empty terrain. Sometimes the compositions can appear to mirror those of the ‘socialist realist’ tradition derived from Soviet Cinema (see the ‘heroic’ pose in the image above), but across the film they tend to present a very different visual style:

Yellow Earth rejected the aesthetics of social realism by critiquing them through traditional aesthetic codes. It contains a limited range of set images: earth, water, sky, mountains, a tree, a boat (all from the classical landscape painting tradition), and peasants, an ox, a cave home, a Party cadre and PLA soldiers (all Maoist images). (Berry and Farquhar, 1994:95)

Songs
Yellow Earth has a minimal story line. But, although little happens as such, there is narrative development through the lyrics of the songs. These are explored in some detail by Farquhar, who demonstrates that it is through the songs (and the singing) that the central discourse about bringing the ‘new’ (the Communist ideology) to the ‘old’ (the traditional life of the peasantry) is articulated. The re-writing of the lyrics of traditional songs was a major concern for the Party – ‘new wine in old bottles’, but, as Farquhar points out, the song collector misses the importance of the voice of the young woman.

Yin and yang
Farquhar’s 1992 analysis (also alluded to in her 1994 paper with Berry) explores what she calls the ‘hidden gender identity’ in the film. She suggests that the meaning of the film is hidden in its presentation of the people, the landscape and a minimal story. She uses the Taoist concepts of the yin and yang to foreground the story. The concepts do not relate directly to ‘men’ and ‘women’ but rather to gender principles which could be manifest in all things. Thus yin refers to the moon, the Earth, Autumn, Winter, darkness, water, femininity, death and stillness. Yang refers to sun, heaven, Spring, Summer, light, fire, masculinity, life, movement.

“The yang/yin structure of the film is not one of fixed gender confrontation, or simple patriarchy, but one of disharmonious relationships” (Farquhar 1992: 156)

Since the film begins with a memorable image of sky (yang) and earth (yin) and goes on to explore several other ‘elemental’ oppositions, it is clear that this approach to an analysis offers rich pickings.

The location of the film has a further symbolic power as it represents both the mythic birthplace of the Chinese people and the base from which the Communists went forward, after the Long March in the 1930s, to eventually wrestle control of the whole country from the Japanese and the Nationalists. Uniquely, it represents the birth of ‘old’ and ‘new’ China.

Summary
Farquhar recognises that the yin/yang approach offers only one reading of what is, as many audiences have discovered, a film which hides its meanings very carefully. But whatever approach we take to the film it is clear that it represented in 1984 a decisive break with the socialist realist tradition, not only in its aesthetics, but also in its lack of a clear central social message about the revolution. Indeed, it seems reasonably clear from the film that a central tenet of Maoist thought (and practice) is being challenged. Although the soldier and song-hunter Gu Qing is a sympathetic character with noble motives, he is too distanced by his own training to be able to understand the peasant world that he encounters and as a result he does not bring the promised transformation to the lives of Cuiqiao and her brother and father.

In their different ways, many Fifth Generation films would later question how the ‘modernisation’ offered by Maoism could engage with the traditional lives of people also being subjected to the external pressures of globalisation and consumerism. Like Yellow Earth, some films would look at the earlier decades of the twentieth century for a ‘way’ in to this question. In doing so, filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou would also have to withstand charges of ‘elitism’ from audiences, more used to ‘easy to understand’ narratives as well as attempts by the government to curtail activities that could be seen as critical of central policies – a tall order indeed.

References
Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar (1994) ‘An Analysis of Yellow Earth and Black Cannon Incident’ in Herlich and Desser (eds) op cit.
Mary Ann Farquhar (1992) ‘The ‘hidden’ gender in Yellow Earth’ in Screen Vol 33 No 2.
Linda C. Herlich and David Desser (eds) (1994) Cinematic Landscapes, Austin: University of Texas Press
Tony Rayns (1986) ‘Review of Yellow Earth’ in Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol 53 No 633, October

Roy Stafford 3/5/07