Yellow Earth

Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth is set in 1939, when the Guomingdang and the Chinese Communist Party have temporarily joined forces to fight Japanese invaders. The protagonist, Gu Qing, is a CCP soldier who travels to a poor, rural village in Shaanbei to collect local folk songs for CCP propaganda. Gu Qing who is referred to as Brother Gu, stays with a peasant widower Da Shu and his two children, Cui Qiao and Hanhan.

During his short visit, Brother Gu and Da Shu’s family exchange culture and tradition. Gu experiences peasant life, a very alien and disturbingly different culture when compared to his own. At the same time Brother Gu passes along the teachings of Maoist Communism, focusing mainly gender equality. Eventually Cui Qiao, Da Shu’s teenage daughter, falls in love with Brother Gu and begs to leave the village with him before her arranged marriage date. Brother Gu leaves without Cui Qiao, but promises to return one day. Before that day comes, Cui Qiao decides to escape on her own by braving the Yellow River. Her fate is unknown. The movie concludes with the villagers, performing a rain dance for their failing crops.

Yellow Earth does a wonderful job of illustrating the culture clash between a much more modernized mindset portrayed by Brother Gu and the rural village laws that govern Da Shu’s life and household. Chen Kaige illustrates this conflict skillfully, using both blatant and more subtle cues to provoke the audience. The most blatant example of this is the constant discussion on gender equality between Da Shu and Brother Gu. During one of these discussions, Brother Gu informs Da Shu that in the more modernized south China, men and women pick their spouses based on love and affection. No dowry, betrothal, or match maker at all. Da Shu finds this very strange and responds only that the rules of the village govern the way they live and that he doesn’t indicate any plans to change those rules. Similarly, when Brother Gu informs Cui Qiao about women in the military or his ability to sew, it really opens her eyes to a world beyond the poor village. Here we see the older generation, Da Shu, refusing to buy into the changes occurring in a rapidly developing China. However, the youth, represented by Cui Qiao, absorb these new ideas zealously, with illusions of grandeur. We may be able to take this theme one step further by looking at Chen Kaige’s personal life as a Red Guard who denounced his own father and easily bought into the ideas of something revolutionary.

Chen Kaige also uses this film to educate the audience on the fringes of the China’s growth. Brother Gu sought folk songs he could adapt to the army to raise morale, to better the CCP. Ironically, this quest yields only tunes of hardship, sorrow, and despair. Cui Qiao sings about the gender inequalities she and other women face in the village while Hanhan’s only real lines in the movie occur when he sings a song of sadness as Brother Gu leaves. When Brother Gu asks Da Shu for a song, he merely responds he only sings when he is sad. This extreme suffering and poverty definitely shakes Brother Gu’s resolve as a soldier and a propagandist. Brother Gu’s response can be drawn as a parallel to Chen Kaige’s shaken resolve after his time as a Red Guard. Ultimately, the village’s hopeless, depressing state is a good representation of the people that fall of the grid as China changes, depicting how some people cannot keep up with China’s cultural growth. As the film concluded, I believe the village was ultimately doomed to be forgotten as the rest of China marches forward into the future. Going back to Chen Kaige’s personal life, I believe this theme in Yellow Earth serves to remind the audience that the China they have today did not come about without sacrifices.