Film analysis: Red sorghum (1987)

Red sorghum is a masterpiece of the Chinese ‘5^th generation’ directors Yimou Zhang, meanwhile it won the very first golden bear from the Berlin film festival in the year 1988 for the temporary Chinese film industry. Adapted by the first 2 chapters of Mo Yan’s novel ( Mo Yan, the famous novel writer, won the Nobel Prize for literature last year), “It is a tribute of life in the wild sorghum field by the language of film” the director describe his first directing work to the reporter. The main character ‘ Juer’ in this film is a significance which inspired the following filmmakers and script writers of creating more and more brave, awaken Chinese female features.

Humanistic solicitude is the eternal subject for contemporary Chinese writers and filmmakers, especially the concern about female. Mo depicted his ideal female as the color red—hot, bright and unforgettable like the power of life. In the background of the Japanese invasion around year 1930, the film revolves around the life of Juer starts from the day her father exchanges her to a 50-year-old leprous business man with a donkey. Instead of being subordinated to her fate, she fights with a scissors in her hand, resist this consummation of marriage until her husband be murdered 3 days after. “…these two characters, gender liberation (her fight against feudal standards) and patriotic leadership ( her resistance against the Japanese), are paralleled, with economic enlightenment, thrown in for good measure.” [1] She takes over her dead husband’s red sorghum wine business and achieves economic independence. When the Japanese solders intrude into the village she lives, slaughter and skin innocent peasants, she is the one stands out and plan the revenge, end up being shot down in the wild red sorghum filed. “Forefront in its portrayal of desire and sexuality, the film broke the code of modesty that governed the conduct of a virtuous woman that had been dominant on screen in the previous decades.” [2] Juer is a sign to national awakening, a new start of a age and a perfect, classic goddess on the screen. By creating Juer, the director Zhang achieve his goal of focusing on woman’s desire, identifying female aesthetic and establishing a subject position for woman as cinematic spectators.  

Reference

[1] China into film—frame of reference in contemporary Chinese Cinema (1999) 791.430951 SIL

Jerome Silbergeld

 

[2]http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/coming-attraction-asia-society-screens-red-sorghum-based-mo-yans-novel ( 28/02/2013)

 

Bibliography

Woman through the lense: gender and nation in a century of Chinese cinema—Shuqin cui

http://tech.mit.edu/V109/N13/red.13a.html