Yellow Earth (no 47)

by Allan Fish

(China 1984 89m) not on DVD

Aka. Huang tudi

The ice on the Yellow River doesn’t melt in June

p  Guo Keqi  d  Chen Kaige  w  Zhang Ziliang  novel  “Echo in the Deep Valley” by Ke Lan  ph  Zhang Yimou  ed  Wan Liu, Pei Xiaonan  m  Zhao Jiping  art  He Qun

Xue Bai (Cuiqiao), Wang Xueqi (Gu Qing), Tan Tuo (father), Liu Qiang (Hanhan),

The film that really brought Chinese cinema, and its Fifth Generation of filmmakers, into western consciousness, and one of the greatest debut films of its decade, Yellow Earth is a film quite unlike any other you’ll have seen.  It’s almost unrecognisable from the later pieces that Kaige turned to in his later years and, though the previously discussed Farewell, My Concubine is undoubtedly an exceptional film, few true denizens of Chinese cinema would not nominate his debut film as his best. 

            The film’s opening caption sets the scene; “in September 1937, the need for unified resistance against the Japanese by the Communists and the Kuomintang forced Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government to recognise the communist Shaanxi-Gansun-Ningxia border region.  However, the people of the northern Shaanxi province still suffered heavily at the hands of the Kuomintang local government.  Artists of the communist 8^th Route Army come to collect folk songs…”  We’re now in spring 1939, and one such soldier, Gu Qing, arrives in a small community to stay with an old farmer – who still prays to the deaf gods to ensure a good harvest – and his two children, and finds that his 14 year old daughter, Cuiqiao, about to be sold off into marriage, is an excellent singer.

            It’s this clash of tradition against modernity that dominates the film, and though the communist ideal will indeed replace the traditional religions of the Chinese heartland, it won’t be quick enough for our poor Cuiqiao.  The titles go on to say that “in this ancient place, the melody of Xintianyou hangs in the air throughout the year”, but it does so in a most melancholically way, and Cuiqiao seems very much its symbol.  She seems dispirited from the outset; curious, yes, but downcast (compare her say to Ziyi Zhang’s ever smiling girl in her breakthrough film The Road Home).  Hanhan brings hope into her life temporarily, but she’s soon brought back down to earth and tragedy ensues. 

            The tale is told against one of the harshest landscapes ever captured on film, beautiful but undoubtedly forbidding and unforgiving.  What contributes most to this stark vision is the way the film is shot.  As Mark Cousins observed, “by tilting the camera up at the sky or down at the earth, Chen and Zhang often excluded the vanishing point so central to western film-making.”  Looking at their later output, one does have to question how much cinematographer Zhang Yimou had to do with the visual style, for its undoubtedly filled with the same sort of pictorial composition and framing as would characterise his later masterpiece, Ju Dou, while once Yimou turned director himself, Kaige’s films got progressively more operatic in visual and thematic tone. 

            In general, the feeling inspired in the viewer is not due to individual scenes but a collective whole.  Even to a westerner whose ears are not used to the very vernacular tones of Chinese folk-singing, the sequences of Cuiqiao singing while collecting water against a dusky, darkened sky are amongst the most stunning you will ever see.  The other central protagonist, Hanhan, represents our own feelings of alienation from this remote world, but we, like Hanhan, warm to it.  The opening song, indeed, of workers singing at the fate of seasonal employment, losing their jobs over the harsh winter months, could easily be appreciated by those in the Tourism trade in the west, while the idea of arranged marriages still sparks controversy in the present day.  It’s a hard film to describe in many ways.  As Tony Rayns said, “Chen Kaige and his cinematographer Zhang Yimou have invented a new language of colours, shadows, glances, spaces, and unspoken thoughts and implications, and they’ve made their new language sing.”  In more ways than one, one might add, giving us a glimpse, like two other films of the same decade listed under the same letter, Yol and Yeelen, into a brave new world, both cinematically and culturally.