ABSTRACT
The storyline of one of the most important films in the history of Chinese cinema, Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, features a young soldier from the People’s Liberation Army trekking through the hinterlands of the northern provinces in the late 1930s in search of folk songs from various rural regions. His job was to bring the traditional melodies and lyrics back to his commanding officers so that the peasants’ songs could be transformed into popular tunes praising the communist revolution. The songs were then used as a vital part of the revolutionary force’s national propaganda campaign. Set in a desolate mountain village, the movie also revealed the miserable conditions in which Chinese peasants lived at the time, and still do in some areas today. This masterpiece of China’s fifth generation of filmmakers, and the first of the Chinese ‘new wave’ films, was extremely controversial when it was released in 1985. Abstract, open-ended, and deeply metaphorical, Yellow Earth did not follow the didactic format typical of Chinese cinema after 1949. Chinese cultural authorities thus wondered about director Chen’s intentions and about the audience’s response. Is Yellow Earth a heroic or tragic story? A tale of progress or backwardness? Whose purposes are served by the film, the Communist Party or the Party’s critics?
