Rating: 4.5/5
Asian Cinema Challenge 2023 | 20/52 | Chinese Cinema: The Fifth Generation
This old yellow earth, it lets you tread upon it and plough it up. Are you willing to do it? You don't respect it...
Early Spring, 1939 In the vast expanse between Yan’an and Shaanxi, along the sparse Qinling Mountains, walks Gu Qing, a soldier from the CCP Eighth Route Army, sent out to collect local folk songs. In the distance, he hears a peasant folk song about the toils of working the land. He sees a wedding procession, with musicians performing around a bridal sedan. It arrives in a small village, where they quickly usher the bride, her head draped in red fabric, to the altar to marry a much older man. Gu Qing enters the village, making his intentions known to the people. He meets the 13-year-old bride and shares food with the wedding party, which includes plates of wooden fish meant to give the feeling of having plenty when they have little.
At dusk, we meet Cui Qiao at the banks of the Yellow River, singing a song about the complex life of women, whose families forcibly marry them off. The moment has a musical quality as the accompanying score grows lush. She carries buckets of water up the hill, passing her younger brother, Hanhan, who is still out tending the sheep, waiting for her return so they can go home together. Gu Qing travels to the next village and asks to live with a poor family, as he has heard that people experiencing poverty carry the local songs. Therefore, the people place him with Cui Qiao’s family.
Gu Qing watches as Cui Qiao tends to the household chores. Talking with her father, he changes the words to one of the songs he’s heard to communicate that, in the South where he’s from, women choose their own husbands and do so when they are older than 13 or 14. The father finds the idea useless and rebukes Gu Qing’s suggestion that his village must change. But Cui Qiao listens intently while continuing her work. She introduces herself and her brother. Through song, we learn that her mother has passed.
The film follows these characters through a season as Gu Qing befriends the children and Cui Qiao grows restless with the prospect of a life different than the only one she’s known.
— There are hundreds and thousands of Shaanbei folksongs. Tell me, how can you know them all and remember them? — When life becomes hard, you remember them. Collecting our bitter songs—what's the use? — We collect the folksongs and put new words to them. We give them to our soldiers, boys and girls of Cui Qiao's age, to sing. To let people know how our suffering people are living in fear, how wives are being beaten, and why workers and farmers are starting a revolution. The Eighth Route Army hears these songs as they cross the Yellow River and march east, and fight the enemy and struggle against the rich without fear.
With this movie, directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou revolutionized the filmmaking process in China. They, along with a handful of other filmmakers, became known as the Fifth Generation. These filmmakers went through the Beijing Film Academy—the first generation to do so after the BFA had been closed for years during the Cultural Revolution. Through that school, they were encouraged to experiment with style, which led to innovative methods of visual storytelling and political allegory—a significant break from the social realism model adopted after the Communist victory of 1949.
The film explores how Chinese cultural identities persisted across movements. That, despite the CCP’s headquarters in the Shaanxi region, feudal customs continued to exist. Zhang Yimou employs minimal camera movement as a visual technique to convey the long stillness in culture. Yimou’s love of color also shines through in the ochre tones of the Chinese landscape and the persistence of red, particularly in the young women who are forced to marry and denied any personal agency.
Each character receives their own musical theme, and each theme has distinct sonic qualities that combine folk song with specific instrumentation. In this way, the film conveys to us the disparate perspectives of these characters, honoring each, even when the other doesn’t understand it. As a result, the audience finds a deep empathy for each of them. That said, Cui Qiao’s story was the most moving for me.
In this ancient place, the melodies of 信天游（xintianyou）drift the year round.
This film elided government censorship through ambiguity, not criticizing the Communist Party while still highlighting its failures to uplift the peasant class it claimed to support. Still, the film faced harsh criticism within China, but garnered international recognition for the Fifth Generation. This recognition paved the way for films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine to reach global audiences with visually stunning storytelling.
Once the sheen of Fifth Generation filmmakers wore off, their influence did not seem to have a lasting impact on Chinese filmmaking. However, their reputation persists worldwide, and their films remain among the most celebrated to emerge from China.
Criterion is finally giving attention to Fifth Generation films, so hopefully, they will add this movie to the collection soon.