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This week’s Staff Pick is: Red Sorghum (1987)  Directed by: Zhang Yimou Cinematography by: Gu Changwei IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093206/ Summary by Brian Rawnsley from IMDB: “In 1930s China a young woman is sent by her father to marry the leprous owner of a winery. In the nearby red sorghum fields she falls for one of his servants. When the master dies she finds herself inheriting the isolated business.” With the recent release of The Great Wall, it seems like a good time to remember that there was a time when Zhang Yimou produced actually good movies before being coopted by the Chinese cultural production hegemony, like Raise the Red Lantern, The Life of Qiu Ju and Ju Dou etc. Red Sorghum is his first feature length directorial project, and it’s a very beautiful movie starring Gong Li, a constant collaborator of Yimou (their output together is often attributed a kind of muse-like quality; they were romantically involved for some time before splitting in the 90s, around the same time Yimou’s movies began to be boring). Zhang Yimou is part of the “Fifth Generation”, a label attributed to young Chinese filmmakers of the 80s who studied cinema at the Beijing Film Academy and collaborated in the ensuing years on new styles and practices, often producing ideologically critical films due to their first-hand witnessing of the artistically destructive Cultural Revolution. At the same time, these filmmakers began to be noticed abroad, first in the arthouse world and eventually in American box offices, which is why Zhang Yimou eventually just started stacking bank by making huge sweeping historical epics with nice color palettes. I have not seen Red Sorghum but I have seen his other early films, and quite a few films of the Fifth Generation filmmakers (my personal favorite is Chen Kaige; if you like Red Sorghum please watch Yellow Earth, where Zhang worked as a cinematographer). Red Sorghum is only available for streaming on Amazon UK, and its not on YouTube (lame!) so you’ll have to get creative to check it out. --- From the Staff Picks Archives January 31st, 2017: Cure February 7th, 2017: Westfront 1918 February 14th, 2017: John Wick As an aside, I've got more movie ideas for the coming weeks but if you want anything in particular I'm open to suggestions
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Feb 21, 2017 22:05
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| # ? May 3, 2024 12:34 |
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i still havent watched cure 
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Feb 22, 2017 01:39
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Prepping some funny stuff for this one. Like Sorghum? drat near killed em! etc.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:53
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Thanks for picking a film almost impossible to get hold of! (Nah it's not that bad) It is on youtube btw, just not subbed. Lessons learnt from this film: Don't go off into the grass and shag drunk men, if you do, oh well, may as well marry him I guess. Always drink the piss wine. Don't bother dressing your children, they'll only spill wine on it anyway. Don't look directly at the sun during an eclipse. Other things learnt: The background noise in this film sounds just like the tinnitus I get when lying in bed at night. Some good life lessons there. I rate it a 8/10. Legit though, it was nicely put together, I like the lack of background music and might watch that song and dance from the beginning again. Actually worth watching, if you can get hold of it.
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Feb 24, 2017 00:36
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Nettle Soup posted:Thanks for picking a film almost impossible to get hold of! (Nah it's not that bad) It is on youtube btw, just not subbed. Yea, movies from this period are kind of a pain the get a hold of. Even in an undergrad course specifically about Mainland Chinese Films from 1970 to 2000, the professor showed up day one with a binder full of bootleg VCDs and told us to copy and swap them among ourselves so we could get a hold of all the movies for the semester lol
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Feb 27, 2017 19:35
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Watching this now and will provide my thoughts after it ends 
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Feb 27, 2017 19:35
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I skipped this week's movie because I don't have access to a professor binder.
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Feb 27, 2017 23:01
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 I've always enjoyed Zhang's slavish devotion to color coding his films, even this feature which is for the most part, grounded in the type of realist shooting meant to evoke nothing but the natural world; but Gong Li is just constantly emitting this red glow. It's a great set up in that first sequence when she is being carried in the sedan: there's these wide angle shots of an empty, huge landscape, and the film keeps returning to her small, isolated box shot in extreme close up. Her world is just totally separated from the lives of the men who are controlling her.  Like this as well, its like she's been entombed in the sorghum.  And her, she's been drained and defeated. Zhang returns to this exact same shot in Raise the Red Lantern a few years later and its got a more emotionally resonant usage in that film, but it was neat to see flashes of the ideas he was working out in his early work. I mentioned Yellow Earth in the OP and if you like these compositions:   You should check it out because it's an entire movie that looks like that. It has a much greater emphasis on the overwhelming power of landscape (aka The State) and the inability of the people living there to overcome it, physically and ideologically; it's more explicit in its politics since its about Kuomintang and Communists coming into contact with Japanese invaders. The subs I found for this were really bad:  But they often are All the screenshots I took: http://imgur.com/a/2fIRa
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Feb 28, 2017 16:08
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 I will not scatter your ashes to the heartless sea...
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Feb 28, 2017 16:09
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| # ? May 3, 2024 12:34 |
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In Training posted:
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Feb 28, 2017 23:58
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