1. For detailed discussions of the conflict and contradictions involved in recent political and economic formulations of Chinese socialism see Bill Brugger, ed. Chinese Marxism in Flux: 1978-84, Essays on Epistemotogy, Ideology and Political Economy . New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985. [BACK]

2. In 1985, Yellow Earth won five festival prizes—in China, Hawaii, Nantes, Spain, and Locarno. This film's impact on filmmakers and critics in China and Hong Kong was documented in Talking About Huang Tudi , Chen Kaiyan, ed. Beijing: China Film Press, 1986. For an English discussion, refer to Tony Rayns's discussion of the dissident "Fifth Generation" of young PRC directors, and also his review of Yellow Earth in the BFI Monthly Film Bulletin , 10/1986. [BACK]

3. A number of melodramatic and political clichés in the original essay Echoes of the Deep Ravine were dropped in Chen Kaige's adaptation into the screenplay titled Silent Is the Ancient Plain . The impressive color tones of the first work print inspired the film's final title, Yellow Earth . [BACK]

4. According to director Chen Kaige, Cuiqiao's father in the film is close to a vérité version of a local peasant he met during the walking reconnaissance of Shaanxi Province, and the bachelor singer in the first marriage sequence was also a local recruit. Yet, according to official views, the film's representation of peasants was ethnocentric and derogatory. One may understand this disparity by noting that Chinese socialism has always favored a more progressive image of peasants. [BACK]

5. "Xintianyou," the folk songs sung in the northern Shaanxi region, provide a rich form for metaphoric expressions and direct telling of the singers' sentiments. [BACK]

6. The first film completed by a group of Beijing Film Academy '82 graduates, One and Eight (Yige He Bage , 1984), was directed by Zhang Junzhao. Cinematographer Zhang Yimou's contribution was already regarded as the major reason for the film's aesthetic excellence. However, the film's entire end- soft

ing was altered due to censorship and it was still banned from circulation. Yellow Earth also had several censorship problems but with its ambiguities it had better luck with the Film Bureau. [BACK]

7. Examples from Xie Jin's most popular films include The Red Detachment of Women (1961), in which a serf girl reacted positively to a soldier's influence and turned herself into a brave red soldier, and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1978), in which two women were emotionally entangled with a persecuted rightist intellectual. Xie Jin has successfully dealt with topical issues in melodramatic form shot with classical style, which made most of his works tear-jerking successes in China. [BACK]

8. According to Tony Rayns, the triumph of Yellow Earth in film festivals prompted the official accusation of its bad influence on local aspirations to "compete with the ideology of the bourgeoisie at foreign film festivals." On the other hand, it is the film's international reputation that silenced established film-makers and officials. [BACK]

9. Originally from Lao Tzu's Daode Jing , this Taoist concept of representation was developed in two seminal discussions on Chinese aesthetics, "On the Origins and Bases of Chinese and Western Painting Techniques" (written in 1936), and "The Spatial Consciousness Expressed in Chinese Painting and Poetry" (written in 1949) by Zong Baihua and collected in Zong's A Stroll in Aesthetics . Shanghai: The People's Press, 1981, pp. 80-113. [BACK]

10. Some of the principles of Chinese spatial representation have been taken up by the West for interrogation of its own norms, e.g., Beijing Opera by Brechtian theater, and hence what is classical for one cultural system can be appropriated for avant-gardist reasons in another. Here, I would quickly add (with reference to Edward Said's discussion on "Traveling Theory" in The World, the Text and the Critic ) that while critical consciousness is the issue, classical Chinese painting as the borrowed theory itself is not free of institutional limitations in the local context. On the other hand, the aestheticization of nature in Yellow Earth could also be quickly seized by Western audiences for sentimentalized retreats to a preindustrial corner of the world. [BACK]

11. Culturalist or neo-Marxist criticisms of mass culture focus mostly on sign systems produced within bourgeois capitalism. In general, hardcore propaganda is taken to be characteristic of socialist sign systems, which is a gross simplification of the complicated mediations and processes at work in those economies and cultures. With reference to China, a more complicated view of socialist mass cultures is called for, and Bill Brugger's Chinese Marxism in Flux can be read along with Victor F. S. Sit, ed. Commercial Laws and Business Regulations of the PRC, 1949-1983 (London: Macmillan, 1983) to see that utilitarian individualism, for example, is functional within recent Chinese economic discourses. [BACK]

12. For substantial discussions of the interweaving of Confucianism, socialism, and patriarchy in contemporary China, see Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). [BACK]

13. Refer to Said's discussion of Derrida's and Foucault's approach to texts in "Criticism Between Culture and System," The World, the Text and the Critic , pp. 183-225. [BACK]

14. The largely asexual representation of revolutionary characters was a major practice in the Revolutionary Model Plays, the only films made during 1970-73. In the post-Cultural Revolution era, the hagiographic mode of representation was debated as suppression of "true human character" in literary and film circles. [BACK]

15. Both Brian Henderson's " The Searchers: An American Dilemma" (Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods Vol. II, pp. 429-49) and Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) have informed the historicist reading of this essay. I am also thankful to Nick Browne of UCLA who introduced me to them and gave valuable advice, and to David James of Occidental College for his inspiring comments. [BACK]

17. While I agree with Heath's critique of Oudart-Dayan's definition of "suturing" in filmic discourse as "narrow," I still refer here, for the sake of convenience, to the privileged example of shot/reverse shot as the suturing approach to spatial articulation. [BACK]

18. In this respect, Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" would not be relevant to many Chinese films, and especially not to those made during the Cultural Revolution, which prohibited erotic codes in its representation of women. [BACK]

19. One may suggest, in terms of Teresa DeLauretis's "Desire in Narrative" in Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 139-46), that there are instances in which the girl in Yellow Earth moves as "mythical subject" in narrative while men became her topoi; the marriage sequence and the river-crossing sequence are arguable examples. [BACK]

20. The four Chinese characters in the shot are "San Cong Si De," meaning "three obediences and four virtues." The "three obediences" for a Chinese woman are obedience to her father at home, to her husband after marriage, and to her son in her widowhood. [BACK]

21. "Yin" the female element; "Yang," the male element. These two elements in Chinese cosmology involve symbolic systems and economies present both in the male and the female gender. [BACK]

22. "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art," Mao Zedong on Literature and Art . Beijing Foreign Language Press, 1977. [BACK]

23. Recently, the citing of Mao's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum" as the standard of literary and artistic creation in China is usually indicative of a tightened literary policy. In 1987, with the "anti-bourgeois liberalization" movement, China celebrated the 45th anniversary of the "Talks." [BACK]

24. This concept is taken from Gilles Deleuze's "A Quoi Reconnait-on le Structuralisme?" (1973). Hanhan's name in Chinese means simple and lacking the ability to talk well. [BACK]