Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth
Situating Yellow Earth within Chinese National Cinema
Prior to the emergence of the 5th generation of Chinese cinema in the 1980s, the movement that Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984) is positioned in, Chinese national cinema was heavily influenced by state ideology. Various film styles and aesthetics, such as melodrama, realism and Chinese opera were incorporated in its history, resulting in a hybrid and intertextual film culture. The 1980s saw a diffusion of Communist ideology and political restructuring. This marks the emergence of the 5th generation who “depart[ed] from films in the melodramatic tradition” and “the revolutionary models of socialist production” to experiment with visual and narrative delivery as a form of cultural reassessment and ideological critique (Cui, 2003, p. 101). Through an analysis of Yellow Earth, I will be supporting the claim that an indigenous aesthetic developed within the movement. Rather than preferring a reading that sees its aesthetics as entirely original, I will situate the film within its rearticulation of the various Western aesthetics as adopted by China’s film heritage. Firstly, I shall discuss Yellow Earth’s departure from realism through its obscure articulation of history. Secondly, I will explain how the film dismantles melodramatic constructions with its engagement with a primitive form of landscape painting that conjures up the Taoist/Buddhist ontology of being as vast emptiness. Thirdly, I shall explore its intersection with transcendental film style. To conclude, I will map out Yellow Earth’s unique fusion and rearticulation of various film aesthetics explored in the essay.
Historical Void: Yellow Earth’s Departure from Realism
Realism, a signifier of modernism that moves along the progressive trajectory of Chinese cultural history, is considered the dominant aesthetic mood for Chinese national cinema. Being critical towards the ideological implications of realism, Chen Kaige self-consciously engages with its deployment, restructuring its aesthetical signification in the process. It is undeniable that on the surface, the film utilises a realist representation through its departure from expressionism, enabling a stark and anti-spectacular acting style. Landscapes are also shot in extremely naturalistic settings with little mediation. However, I believe that Yellow Earth departs from realism through its unspecific representation of history. Berry and Farquhar argue that the film’s only departure from realism is through its disengagement from national ideology (2006, p. 107). For them, the film is still inherently realist because its “narrative is anchored in real historical events” (ibid, p. 103). I shall discuss how this statement is problematic.
Chinese film prior to the 5th generation fixated its narrative on the present, a realist visuality that explores notions of modernity and articulates the possibilities of change. For example, the social-realist model adopted during the Maoist regime depicted the current conditions of the proletariat, interpellating its spectators to identify with the utopian project of the Communist party that moves towards the future. However, Yellow Earth engages with a great disparity between the present and past. It conjures up primitive landscapes and rituals, filmic representations that are uncanny to spectators accustomed to realist depictions of modernity. The scene in which Gu Qing returns to the Communist camp in Yan’an could be constructed to represent a stable and real point in history. However, Gu Qing is bombarded with a ritualistic drumming procession. He watches on without any expression, signifying an unstable access to the historical signifiers of the Communist era. The scene also utilises hyperkinetic movements that meander within the procession, a displacement from the still and naturalistic digesis, disabling the spectator’s contemplation of history in that particular moment. Furthermore, the last scene, in which the villagers attempt to conjure up the metaphysical presence of the rain god, works as a parallel to the Communist drum ritual, reworking any possible historical signification of the first scene into a form of primitivism. Far from depicting a particular event in history, it engages in ethnographical “dream time, of the time of renewed myths,” displacing historical accuracy and specificity into contemplative timelessness (Chow, 1995, p. 42).
Yellow Earth’s historical ambiguity is further enforced through the framing of landscapes that utilises deep focus. Within the vast naturalistic stillness of the landscape, dwarfed characters move directly along the depth of field, enabling a vastness that extends within the film image. Deleuze states, “depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that can be defined by memory, virtual regions of past,” being “less a function of reality than a function of remembering, of temporalization: not exactly a recollection but an invitation to recollect” (1989, p. 105). Thus, historical narrative in Yellow Earth is based on subjective memory that is not linear and anchored in real moments. Rather, it is perceived through the spectator’s own engagement, making it dreamy, unspecific and multiple.
Despite this, it does not abandon history with what Jameson refers to as the “nostalgia mood,” in which the past is articulated “through stylistic connotation,” serving as “a symptom of the waning of our historicity” (1984, p. 66-68). I argue that despite its ahistorical constructions, Yellow Earth is still engaged in a discourse of history. It rejects nostalgic and surface representations of history, displacing the specificity of history into a vast depth of field that functions as a contemplative framework. This rearticulates history, separates it from ideological implantations and self-referentially engages with its spectators’ intuition through a recollection of subjective perceptions of history. Thus, history is absent in the foreground, but is accessible critical rearticulation by the spectators via depth cues.
Taoist Primitivism: Emptying out Melodramatic Formulations
The naturalism and depth described above can be attributed to how Yellow Earth’s rejects “the aesthetics of socialist realism by critiquing them through traditional aesthetic codes” (Berry & Farquhar, 1994, p. 95). Its cinematography that “works with a limited range of colours, natural lighting, and non-perspectival use of filmic space” resembles ancient “Chinese scroll-painting,” in which “centrifugal spatial configurations open up to a consciousness that is not moved by desire but rather by the lack of it” (Yau, 1991, p. 64-65). This corresponds to a primitive mode of address in film, the Taoist philosophy of vast emptiness. The Tao Te Ching states, “there was something formless yet complete, that existed before heaven and earth” (cited in Waley, 1934, p. 174). The first few scenes of Yellow Earth are exemplary of its primitive aesthetic. The film opens with a stark shot of barren earth. Gu Qing, who signifies the desire and movement of Communist ideology, emerges at the top of the frame, dwarfed by the vast landscape but slowly emerging towards clearer view. Before his figure is significantly constructed in view, the film crosscuts into another still image of barren earth. Then the camera pans up to the sky, engulfing the screen with an empty bluish tint. Thus, from the start, the spectator is bombarded by a strange decentralising effect that is uncommon to both Chinese cinema and Hollywood narrative. Rather than serving as establishing shots, the naturalistic setting is constructed in the forefront and appears as the essence of the film. This “signifies a deliberate emptying” that when viewed in relation to the ideology of Maoism, “wrests apparatuses of representation from the kind of rhetorical coercion that typifies communist state discourse” (Chow, 1995, p. 40).
Pickowicz states, “the melodramatic imagination is deeply rooted in Chinese life” (1993, p. 325). The figuration of the family (Jia), a signifier to modernity and a micro parallel to the nation state (Guo Jia) is the archetype of China’s melodramatic tradition. Yellow Earth is conscious about the signifying implications of the family, bringing in the emptying effect of its aesthetic into the structure of the family. While the outdoor shots of stark naturalism are strong indicators to such an aesthetic, the mood it evokes also pervades into the material stronghold of familial relations, the home. Firstly, the home in Yellow Earth is situated within the naturalistic setting of a cave. This emphasises the intrusiveness of the home towards an empty and original state. Yellow earth is constructed into a dwelling. Secondly, the primitive family is not stable and complete with the absence of a motherly figure. Thirdly, in the scene when Gu Qing first enters the cave, the absence of a strong melodramatic narrative and is apparent within the communication dynamics of the family. Besides the inhibited movements of Cui Jiao, the family members are all statically positioned at specific points. The father sits in a meditative and unresponsive state. As soon as Hanhan enters the narrative space, he stops all movement and stands emotionlessly by the door. The only dynamic that fuels any narrative development is Gu Qing’s enquiries about folk songs that he is attempting to document and restructure for ideological purposes. The editing achieves a repetitive pace in relation to the desire for response from the three family members. The same shots that are marked with silence move in a cycle, highlighting the lack of communication and expanding symbolic space between the characters. Thus, the family and melodramatic dynamics are emptied out. Gu Qing’s one-sided dialogue, as a catalyst to the reaffirmation of the family through the parallel with the interests of the nation as a macro-family, is met with silence, echoing the blank deepness of the exterior landscape.
Transcendental Style
Berry and Farquhar draws a parallel between Yellow Earth’s aesthetic and French poetic realism, highlighting “political ambivalence, personal disappointment, melodious sadness, and a sense of degeneration and death” (2006, p. 103). This situates Yellow Earth within a more symbolic deployment of realism in which the subjectivities of its protagonists result in the anxieties explored in the narrative. However, with its primitivism, emptying out of filmic perspectives, irrationalism and heavy symbolism, I believe that Yellow Earth has more similarities with the uncommon, yet trans-national aesthetic of cinematic transcendentalism. Schrader formulates two aspects of transcendental style as, “an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment which culminates in a decisive action” and “a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it” (1972, p. 42, 49). In Yellow Earth, Cui Qiao, as the signifier of modernity, senses disunity between the primitive customs that entrap her and the utopian promise of liberation implanted on her by Gu Qing. She makes the decisive action of crossing the turbulent river. The disparity is not resolved as she drowns in the river. However, at that moment, the river, as a naturalistic element, becomes a vehicle of transcendence. The river that nourished her, symbolised through the drawing of water, ends up consuming her motivation and action. Disparity is absorbed into the river, emptying out ideological formations and its decisive actions in favour of a pure form. Thus, the film offers a glimpse and feeling of a meta-view that transcends a fixation of particular moments in history and their ideological effects. It strives towards transcendence through the primitivism of its traditional aesthetics.
In this paper, I argued that Chen Kaige deconstructs realist representations of history through his use of cinematic depth to offer a self-reflexive address based on subjective recollection of history. Secondly, I discussed how the film conjures a mood that resembles the Taoist notion of emptiness by drawing the style of its cinematography from the primitive and culturally specific art form of landscape painting. This aesthetic that is used to destabilise history it its exterior shots also permeates into the home, in which it empties out melodramatic notions of the family. Lastly, I explored the film’s similarities to Schrader’s conceptualisation of transcendental style. With all these factors, it become necessary to view Yellow Earth as a critical fusion of various film aesthetics. It is a ‘becoming’ that draws and rearticulates multiple reference points to the effect of generating a unique localised style. As a turning point, it opened up the possibilities for a revolutionary exploration of film style within the field of Chinese film.
References
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