Word: film
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...Monday, April 27, the Harvard Film Archive will screen “Yellow Earth” with an introduction by Professor Eugene Y. Wang of Harvard’s East Asian Art History Program. Wang reveals that beneath an essentially “thin narrative” of rural Chinese peasants in 1939, there lies a rich history and an undercurrent of deep psychological introspection...
...film has been criticized for its flat characterization, ambiguous exposition, and awkward camerawork by cinematographer Zhang Yimou. Indeed, transitions from scene to scene are abrupt and jarring, and the camera remains stationary throughout each scene as characters walk in and out of the frame. However, this lack of sophistication serves also to enhance the bare setting and the serious reflection the filmmakers had in mind. “Every kind of criticism leveled against the film is precisely its strength in retrospect,” Wang says...
...Communism’s failures, Wang considers the work introspective and meditative rather than political or judgmental. He objects to reviewers who take the film’s plot too literally, thinking that the soldier serves only to represent Communism as false hope. “I think this film is poised to be post-ideological,” he says. “It is really a profound reflection about the long stretch of Chinese civilization...
...fact that Monday’s 35mm film reel of “Yellow Earth” had to be acquired in Europe and not in China only underscores just how lost that past can seem. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW...
...caught up with contemporary Chinese art and film that the 1980s seem so distant,” Wang says. “I want to resurrect this era because in terms of what Chinese youngsters remember, it is a distant past...