Red Sorghum Themes
WHEN Zhang Yimou made his directorial debut, Zhang Yimou made his directorial debut, Red Sorghum, in 1987, he was better known as a cinematographer whose talent had been crucial to the success of critically acclaimed films like Zhang Junzhao's One and Eight (1984, released 1987) and Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984). Not only did Red Sorghum become a seminal film of the Fifth Generation, it also won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1988, becoming the first mainland Chinese film ever to be awarded the highest honour at a major international film competition.
Set in the 1920s and '30s in northern China, Red Sorghum's narrative centres on the fate of a young woman who is forced to marry a rich old leper but who eventually falls in love with a younger …show more content…
The next image gives the film its title: a close-up of the rhythmic undulation of the red sorghum leaves in the wind -- a powerful metaphor for the sexual act and a symbol of the film's central themes of passion and freedom. Later in the film, the trampling of the sorghum field changes into a symbol of oppression as the members of the community, young and old, are forced by Japanese soldiers to flatten the wild sorghum to make space for a new …show more content…
It also carries on its shoulders the hopes of the Xi'an Film Studio, birthplace of a tentative "new wave" of Chinese filmmaking.
The mainline Chinese movie market is enormous (18 studios supply 140 films a year, attracting 25 billion admissions), but a deliberate effort to produce world-class cinema is being made mostly at Xi'an (rhymes with "shan").
"Red Sorghum" begins as a memory, being told by an unseen narrator, of his grandmother. She was, we learn, a poor girl who in the late 1920s was sent by her parents into a pre-arranged marriage with a much older man. The good news was that he owned a vineyard. The bad news was that he had leprosy.
The girl thoughtfully slips a pair of scissors into her blouse before being borne off by sedan chair to meet her husband. As her party makes its way through a field of sorghum, it is attacked by bandits. One of her escorts fights off the assailant, and then slips away into the fields - only to accost her the next day in a raid of his own. But she is grateful to him for having saved her life, and they make love. Time
Set in the 1920s and '30s in northern China, Red Sorghum's narrative centres on the fate of a young woman who is forced to marry a rich old leper but who eventually falls in love with a younger …show more content…
The next image gives the film its title: a close-up of the rhythmic undulation of the red sorghum leaves in the wind -- a powerful metaphor for the sexual act and a symbol of the film's central themes of passion and freedom. Later in the film, the trampling of the sorghum field changes into a symbol of oppression as the members of the community, young and old, are forced by Japanese soldiers to flatten the wild sorghum to make space for a new …show more content…
It also carries on its shoulders the hopes of the Xi'an Film Studio, birthplace of a tentative "new wave" of Chinese filmmaking.
The mainline Chinese movie market is enormous (18 studios supply 140 films a year, attracting 25 billion admissions), but a deliberate effort to produce world-class cinema is being made mostly at Xi'an (rhymes with "shan").
"Red Sorghum" begins as a memory, being told by an unseen narrator, of his grandmother. She was, we learn, a poor girl who in the late 1920s was sent by her parents into a pre-arranged marriage with a much older man. The good news was that he owned a vineyard. The bad news was that he had leprosy.
The girl thoughtfully slips a pair of scissors into her blouse before being borne off by sedan chair to meet her husband. As her party makes its way through a field of sorghum, it is attacked by bandits. One of her escorts fights off the assailant, and then slips away into the fields - only to accost her the next day in a raid of his own. But she is grateful to him for having saved her life, and they make love. Time