CORRECTIONS APPENDED - [SEE CORRECTIONS BELOW]

In 1980, realist painter Luo Zhong Li caused a stir after unveiling his latest work, “Father,” in Beijing. An enormous, close-up portrait of an expressionless Chinese peasant before a background of yellow landscape, the painting was seen as patronizing and unflattering by many critics. Despite these negative opinions, the work and the ethos that spurred it would become an inspiration for the Chinese cinematic revolution in the decade that followed. The 1984 film “Yellow Earth” from director Chen Kaige is just one of the many works that bears the influence of “Father,” sharing the painting’s piercing insights into rural Chinese life in the face of a changing nation.

On Monday, April 27, the Harvard Film Archive will screen “Yellow Earth” with an introduction by Professor Eugene Y. Wang of Harvard’s East Asian Art History Program. Wang reveals that beneath an essentially “thin narrative” of rural Chinese peasants in 1939, there lies a rich history and an undercurrent of deep psychological introspection.

In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution—a period of mass cultural, political, and economic upheaval initiated by Mao Zedong—Chinese filmmakers sought to return to the perceived origins of their culture as a way of accounting for China’s contemporary problems. “They were asking, ‘Is anything wrong with the makeup of our culture that has led us to where we are now?’” Wang says. “[Filmmakers] had a lot of interest in going to frontier areas to observe the ethnic minorities’ ways of life, to use them as a frame of reference to reflecting China proper.”

“Yellow Earth” takes place in a village on the banks of the Yellow River, where a soldier has been sent to collect folk songs to be used for promoting the Communist Revolution. His primary source is a young girl named Cuiqiao, who longs to escape her village and the arranged marriage that awaits her. Through haunting, tragic songs the girl communicates to the soldier—and, it is implied, to the country that surrounds them—the misery and oppression of life in rural China.

Although critics often view the movie as simply an allegory for Communism’s failures, Wang considers the work introspective and meditative rather than political or judgmental. He objects to reviewers who take the film’s plot too literally, thinking that the soldier serves only to represent Communism as false hope. “I think this film is poised to be post-ideological,” he says. “It is really a profound reflection about the long stretch of Chinese civilization.”

Because the film’s release coincided with a transition in China’s national consciousness, “Yellow Earth” represents a mood and a filmmaking style that straddles two distinct eras, a socialist world of grand, heroic visions and a new, urbanized Chinese narrative.

The film’s sensitive curiosity about this divide is reflected in the complex dualities depicted on screen. The yellow earth is the farmers’ sole mode of sustenance, yet simultaneously it is an oppressive, arid land that binds them to scarcity and poverty. Likewise, the Yellow River symbolizes life and nourishment, but it also eliminates life—when Cuiqiao tries to escape her village by swimming across the river, her singing abruptly ends.

“There is the strong implication that she drowned,” Wang says.

The film has been criticized for its flat characterization, ambiguous exposition, and awkward camerawork by cinematographer Zhang Yimou. Indeed, transitions from scene to scene are abrupt and jarring, and the camera remains stationary throughout each scene as characters walk in and out of the frame. However, this lack of sophistication serves also to enhance the bare setting and the serious reflection the filmmakers had in mind. “Every kind of criticism leveled against the film is precisely its strength in retrospect,” Wang says.

Today, the impact of rural life on China’s cultural consciousness is dwindling. “The post-Zhang Yimou generation is much better equipped to show the dynamics of the urban texture, the urban lifestyle. They are very much in sync with global culture,” Wang says. “But everything comes with a price. That kind of larger cultural vision seems to have been lost.”

Wang adds that although both Chen and Zhang later became celebrity directors on their own—Zhang directed “Raise the Red Lantern” and “House of Flying Daggers,” among others—“Yellow Earth” holds a special place in Chinese cinematic and cultural history. “They never recaptured the magic and power of this mid-1980s collaboration,” he says.

The fact that Monday’s 35mm film reel of “Yellow Earth” had to be acquired in Europe and not in China only underscores just how lost that past can seem. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

“We are so caught up with contemporary Chinese art and film that the 1980s seem so distant,” Wang says. “I want to resurrect this era because in terms of what Chinese youngsters remember, it is a distant past.”

CORRECTIONS

The April 24 arts article "China's 'Yellow Earth' to screen at Brattle" incorrectly stated both the location of the screening and the provenance of the film to be shown. The screening of "Yellow Earth" is set to take place at the Harvard Film Archive, not the Brattle Theatre, on Monday, April 27 at 7 p.m. In addition, the film to be screened did, in fact, come from China, not Europe, as the article states.