CCLA01: Strangers to Ourselves: the Critical Study of Narrative

Week 13 (2): Red Sorghum: Film, Audience and Ideology

Reading:

Rey Chow, "The Force of Circumstances: Defiance in Zhang Yimou's Films"

Kwok Kian Woon "Being Chinese in the Modern World"

[Wang Yuejin's "Red Sorghum: Mixing Memory and Desire" is an optional extra, given the stage of the semester we're at].

If you are bemused by Chow's reference to Orientalism, Danielle Sered's article on Edward Said's Orientalism may be helpful.

Preparatory Questions

In our last class on Red Sorghum, I am interested in thinking again how reading critical essays about the movie may enable us to place the movie in analyses using concepts such as ideology, alienation, defamiliarisation, metafiction, and metahistory. One issue that we haven't thought a great deal about in the module, but which is clearly important, is the nature of the audience. Red Sorghum achieved international success unusual for a Chinese movie at the time of its release. Are audiences outside China experiencing the same text, or does the text's meaning change in different contexts?

1. Read Kwok Kian Woon's "Being Chinese in the Modern World." In what sense might we read Red Sorghum as being about Chinese identity and modernity outside of a purely national context? How might Chinese who are not citizens of China read the movie? Try to focus on a specific aspect or episode of the movie in your reply.

2. Is there any way that Red Sorghum might be read in the context of debates about Asianness and Asian values? Try to focus on a specific aspect or episode of the movie in your reply.

3. Pick out any element of the Chow essay which strikes you as significant, and respond to it. Possible areas for discussion would be:

• Zhang's movies as "ethnography" (143-145)
• "Oedipalization" and its relation to China's beeing deprived of power on the world stage(146-149)
• The fact that Zhang's films "lack depth" (150-152), (154-155) and whether this is, if true, a problem
• The possibility that Zhang's films are pai gei waiguoren kan, made for the eyes of foreigners (155-156).
• The way that Zhang's films challenge the notion of ideology as illusion (163).
• The manner in which Chow feels Zhang's movies negotiate with, but do not entirely succumb to, Orientalism.

4. Do you think gender makes a difference in the way that you view the movie Red Sorghum, as Zhu claims that it does when reading the novel? Analyse a specific incident, if possible.