Word: yellowness
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...realist painter Luo Zhong Li caused a stir after unveiling his latest work, “Father,” in Beijing. An enormous, close-up portrait of an expressionless Chinese peasant before a background of yellow landscape, the painting was seen as patronizing and unflattering by many critics. Despite these negative opinions, the work and the ethos that spurred it would become an inspiration for the Chinese cinematic revolution in the decade that followed. The 1984 film “Yellow Earth” from director Chen Kaige is just one of the many works that bears the influence...
...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...
...Yellow Earth” takes place in a village on the banks of the Yellow River, where a soldier has been sent to collect folk songs to be used for promoting the Communist Revolution. His primary source is a young girl named Cuiqiao, who longs to escape her village and the arranged marriage that awaits her. Through haunting, tragic songs the girl communicates to the soldier—and, it is implied, to the country that surrounds them—the misery and oppression of life in rural China...
...Because the film’s release coincided with a transition in China’s national consciousness, “Yellow Earth” represents a mood and a filmmaking style that straddles two distinct eras, a socialist world of grand, heroic visions and a new, urbanized Chinese narrative...
...film’s sensitive curiosity about this divide is reflected in the complex dualities depicted on screen. The yellow earth is the farmers’ sole mode of sustenance, yet simultaneously it is an oppressive, arid land that binds them to scarcity and poverty. Likewise, the Yellow River symbolizes life and nourishment, but it also eliminates life—when Cuiqiao tries to escape her village by swimming across the river, her singing abruptly ends...