Cinema China Day 6 - The Yellow River on Film

A rare opportunity to see the incredibly controversial Chinese documentary Heshang: The River Elegy, broadcast on CCTV in 1988 and quickly banned after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, brilliantly contextualised in an all-day seminar led by Professor Natascha Gentz of the Chinese department of Edinburgh University. Heshang was so controversial because it went public with a debate that had previously been privy to small gatherings of intellectuals; namely the problem of modernisation and China's relationship to the West now that the country was opening up. The documentary's thesis is radically self critical, both of 'backward' traditional culture and the CCP's resistance to modern ideas, and calls for an embracing of Western science and democracy and an end to 1000s of years of self imposed isolation. By utilising an emotionally provocative and lyrical assemblage of images, the makers posit that the Chinese are a grounded, agricultural nation whose origins in the Yellow River established a national character of deep fatalism, which lacks a spirit of adventure. This traditional culture is then contrasted to the liberal, maritime cultures of Europe and Japan, who were able to carve huge empires as a result of the industrial revolution, which ironically came about through Chinese inventions (Paper, Gunpowder etc...). Whilst the Europeans conquered the world, the Chinese built a huge wall, which has become a point of pride to the Chinese, but which the filmmaker merely sees as a shameful reminder of China's inadequacy.

That evening there was a screening of Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984), a film as allusively rare as it is artistically significant, which also explores traditional Chinese culture at the source of the Yellow River, but gives a very different message. The film is set in 1939 in an isolated village that still worships the Dragon god at times of drought, which is visited by a Communist folklorist named Brother Gu, who aims to record the song's of the region and transform them into patriotic marching tunes - a subtle insight into the workings of a propaganda machine. However what he finds is suffering, which is expressed in the melancholy songs sung by the peasants. Lodged with a poor family, Gu becomes a source of fascination for the young daughter Cuiqiao, who is about to be forced into an arranged marriage. Cuiqiao begs Gu to take her away to join the communists, but he cannot as, much like the villagers traditions, the party has its rules and they cannot be bent. In this sense there is not much to choose between them, and Cuiqiao seems fated to suffer regardless of the society. He promises to return, but by the time he does it is too late, as Cuiqiao drowns attempting to escape, her death worked into the film's poetically minimalist programme with the simple yet powerful image of her bowl floating to the shore.

This was the film that gave birth to the famous Fifth Generation and revolutionised film aesthetic in China after half a century of turgid socialist realism. The film's poetic qualities seem all the more extraordinary in this context, as does the subtle complexity of its ideological critique. On the surface Chen Kaige seems to be enacting a familiar dialectic, with traditional culture on the one hand and the communist party on the other, but what is incredible here is that the former is used to undermine the official ideological pedagogy, which was beginning to break down in this period of opening up. In the final shot we hear the elegiac voice of the now dead Cuiqiao singing 'The Communist Party will save us all', but we know it couldn't save her and at this point the camera pans down to the yellow earth, grounding the film back in the traditions of China and the source of its culture.

This strikes me as a very different stance on the topic to Heshang, and this differnce is manifest in the images. Whereas the documentary uses constant shots from planes to give a sense of liberation from the boundedness to the earth, Zhang Yimou's stunning cinematography in Yellow Earth constantly fills the frame with the landscape, which dwarfs the characters, peasant and communist alike. Its worth pointing out that perhaps only Kiarostami's films come close to using the landscape in such a powerful and expressive way. What makes the work of the Fifth Generation director's so incredible, i think, is the way they enact a social critique indirectly through the film's form. Although they have been unjustly criticised for simplistically exoticising and over-indulging in aesthetic images, i think this visual quality makes films such as Yellow Earth and Raise the Red Lantern more sophisticated and ambiguous in its meaning than the later, more realistic work of the Sixth Generation directors such as Jia Zhang Ke with their more obviously critical stance. The close ups of Cuiqiao's disappointed face, particularly after moments of overt political comment (such as when Gu teaches her brother a revolutionary song) or after she is told her marriage date is set, also possess a stunning potency that destabilises all ideology, allowing the film to transcend the narrowly political and enter the realm of the profoundly human.

Also saw Hou Hsiao-hsien's masterpiece A City of Sadness, a film that has the scope and historical sweep of a Russian novel as it explores through a single family of four brothers the tragic events in Tawain as it made the transition from Japanese colonial rule to occupation by the mainland's defeated nationalist army, and the resulting tension between the natives and the 'born-elsewheres'. What is so brilliant about the film is its indirectness; the massacre the film centres around, the notorious 228 incident, is only alluded to by radio reports and brief glimpses. A series of absences and ellipses in the fragmented narrative, which is littered with barely signposted flashbacks, makes the film deliberately hard to follow - like looking at history through a clouded glass. This distance, even more pronounced for the western viewer, is also built into the formal elements of the film, for instance in the fights which are always filmed in an emotionally detached long shot, as well as the narrative, for instance Tony Leung's mute photographer who is a passive observer of events, powerless to change the course of history.