Yellow Earth

Yellow Earth is a 1984 Chinese drama film. This film is telling a story of a young, village girl who bravely resists old-dated customs and searches for freedom. It was the directorial debut for Chen Kaige. The film's notable cinematography is by Zhang Yimou. At the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony on 27 March 2005, a list of 100 Best Chinese Motion Pictures was tallied, and Yellow Earth came in fourth. The film was produced by Guangxi Film Studio. Zhang Yimou, a colleague of Chen, photographed the film. Richard James Havis, author of Changing the Face of Chinese Cinema: An Interview with Chen Kaige, said that the film was the first Chinese film "at least since the 1949 Communist Liberation, to tell a story through images rather than dialog." Therefore, the film attracted controversy in China. Havis added that the film "was also equivocal about the Communist Party's ability to help the peasants during the Communist revolution", a position which differed from that espoused by the propaganda films that were produced after 1949." Plot Gu Qing, a soldier from the propaganda department of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) Eighth Route Army in CCP-controlled Shaanxi, travels alone from Yan'an to the northern KMT-controlled area of Shaanxi, Shanbei, in the early spring of 1939, with the task of collecting the peasants' folk songs in order to re-write them with communist lyrics in order to boost the morale of the Eighth Route Army soldiers. According to the academic article Color, Character, and Culture: On "Yellow Earth, Black Cannon Incident", and "Red Sorghum" by H. C. Li, Yellow Earth begins with a scene depicting a communist soldier walking several miles. He reaches a small village where he is assigned to live with a poor as well as illiterate family with the task of recording local folk songs for use in the propagandized communist cause. The father in the family, an old widower, dislikes Gu's re-telling of social reforms about women receiving education and choosing who they will marry on their own terms within the communist domain in the province's south, but Cuiqiao, his hard-working daughter, happily listens to his tales and is joyful when her younger brother, Hanhan, becomes friends with Gu. Gu learns the hardships of peasant life and especially that of Cuiqiao.