YELLOW EARTH has been described as the most beautiful Chinese film to date and also a film which could not have been made during the cultural revolution. In-
deed its director, Chen Kaige has created a film of awe-inspiring beauty, a synthesis of barren Chinese landscape and of music which echoes across windswept hills and barren valleys. Yellow Earth is a
product of the generation of
Chinese film directors who graduated
from the Peking Film School which
reopened in 1978. The Chinese author-
ities withdrew Yellow Earth for a time
after its release.
The theme of the film is the relationship
between communism and peasant fatal-
ism, between tradition and change, and
on another level about the morality of
interfering in something you cannot
change. The story is set in 1939 and
centres on Gu, a Communist Party soldier
mountains of Shaanxi province to gather who is sent to the remote and barren
folk songs, the words of which will later
be changed to serve as propaganda in
the war against Japan. Gu insists upon
being billeted with the poorest family in
the village and so finds himself in the
home of Cuigiao, her prematurely ageing 40 father and her younger brother. Cuiqiao's
How many legal and illegal societies will be created! How many churches cathedrals will be opened! How much of citizenship and how much of it will enter this rubbish will be granted Chinese the ranks of the Communist Party of China and fight for the CIA, the Soviet KGB and for world imperialism, under the banner of Mao!' And so on.
One of the most remarkable features of Hoxha's voluminous political testimony is the near complete absence of any theoretical insight into the Albanian experience, indeed of any substantive thought on the political events he had witnessed. Halliday's billing of Hoxha as 'far too intel!!gent to be compared 'to most other Third World leaders', 'very cultured', by farthe best-read head of any Communist party in the bloc', is quite inappropriate, when set against the background of the great dearth of analysis (as opposed to personal and sectarian invective) spread over the many thousands of pages of his memoirs.
In the end, of course, a comparison of Hoxha and Stalin is of limited value Hoxha was the leader of a small and poor country and as such was often at the receiving end of the arrogance and mother has died and her sister has been married to a middle aged man who violently assaults her but with whom she
must live in order to eat.
Gu joins the family in their daily chores
and in their intense poverty. He helps
Cuigiao haul water four miles from the
river and helps her father and brother till
the yellow dust with their half starved ox.
And he gathers the songs they
Cuigiao sings of her dread at her forth-
coming marriage to a man twice her age
whom she does not know and cannot
love. Working with the family, Gu gains
their trust and love and tells Cuiquiao how
the Communist women crop their pigtails,
weild pick axes and choose for them-
selves who they will love and marry. But
Cuiqiao's father is adamant that she must
marry the man he has selected for her -
how otherwise can he pay off her
mother's funeral, her brother's engage-
ment and how else can Cuigiao live?
After a time Gu decides to leave the
village and return to his army unit.
Cuigiao is determined to go with him to
fight against the Japanese, to crop her
hair and escape her marriage. But Gu
insists that she must stay as he does not
have his officers' permission to take her
with him. He says that he will return
before her marriage and take her with
egoism of his larger and more powerful allies. Charcteristic here is the complaint registered after a 'Socialist Albania was treated with disdain by others, as if we were a nuisance! (Only the Czechs are remembered with affection, for their hospitality and civil-s ized manners.) Indeed, behind the verbal bravura, the endless recounting of victories in countless verbal battles, the constant protestation
Tand Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, there lies buried the injured pride of a vour small nation which - against all odds and largely by its own efforts - in the great cataclysm of 1941-5 (which, incidentally, it entered as a colony of Italy) won its national independence, secured its territorial integrity and conduct a socialist revolution that in turn provided the most solid guarantee of its secunty
If one looks at history through the prism of this kind of achievment, then Albania is entitled to its pride. The durability of the Hoxha regime can in the last instance be explained only by the depth of the social consensus established by the revolution
Cdo not need Hoxha's extravagant myth-making for their very real achievements to be recognized.
him to join the army. Gu does not return
and we see Cuigiao's hovel trimmed with
the red of celebration as she is forced to
marry the man she dreads.
Cuiqiao's brother is left alone with the
old father and one night as he is drawing
water from the river Cuiqiao appears.
She has left her husband, cut off her hair
and decided to cross the Yellow river to
join the communists on the other side.
Rowing and singing across the swirling
waters to the freedom Gu has taught her
of, Cuiqiao's song is cut off and her
brother is left on the bank crying in vain
for her to answer him.
Gu returns to the village but finds the
house empty and derelict, with the red
marriage streamers flapping in a dry
breeze. Walking on through the town he
comes upon the peasants dressed in
leaves, performing a dance to the gods
for rain to save their meagre harvest. in
the final scene with the anthem of 'the
Communist Party will save us all' playing
in the background Cuiqiao's brother runs
to meet Gu but cannot break through the
dancing barrier of peasant reaction to
reach him.
Yellow Earth is a visually stunning film.
The mountainous area in which the family
live is so poor that the fish in the wedding
ceremony are wooden replicas and the
ANANA. No be Carole Nove port 19t;