In 2005, Mo Yan, who today won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a remarkable brief memoir for Le Monde in which he described what he calls “an event that I’ve never forgotten and that remains tied to today’s political and social life”—and it was a movie that he saw in 1973, “The Flower Girl,” made in North Korea, directed by Kim Jong-il, based on an opera that was written by Kim Il-sung. The story that Mo tells is amazing and revealing. He was eighteen, and he lived in a rural village and worked on a collective farm at a time when “the countryside was subjected to a kind of paramilitary management.” A young woman from the village told of seeing, in the big city of Qingdao, a movie that “made the viewers cry” and that “a soldier who hadn’t cried a single tear over the death of his father and mother cried so hard that he fainted and had to be carried out by ambulance.” Mo writes that he and others who heard this tale were “rather incredulous: among the Chinese populace, almost every one of whom had endured torments; how could there exist a film that was even sadder than our lives?”
He goes into the picaresque adventure of how he and two friends managed to get to see the film (by means of hard labor, sheer audacity, and good connections). As he watched it, he, too, cried, as did the entire audience, and the fact that the three young men got to see it turned them into “legendary characters” in the village. Now, he writes, he watched the movie again for the purpose of the memoir, found the film “stereotyped, schematic, and simplistic,” and considers why it had such a powerful effect on him and other Chinese viewers. The passages are extraordinary: “At that time, the Cultural Revolution had broken out seven years earlier, and in the course of that long interval of time, people had lost not just their individual freedom but also their freedom of emotion.” He constrasted the North Korean melodrama with the utterly emotionless and doctrinaire movies being made in China at the time:
The film had filled the sentimental void of the Chinese and awakened in them the desire for normal sentiments. We weren’t crying over the tragic destiny of a young girl who sold flowers, but, rather, over ourselves and our country. The screening of this film in China was a considerable political event. It was the sign of the total failure of the Great Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong had unleashed. The tears had washed the eyes of the people, had allowed them to draw the lessons from this tragedy, and they started to hope for a normal life.
That astonishing essay becomes all the more relevant in the cinematic context that first brought Mo’s name to light here, the 1988 release of Zhang Yimou’s film “Red Sorghum,” based on Mo’s novel of the same title (which was subsequently translated by Howard Goldblatt). I didn’t see the film at the time of its release, but caught up with it a few years later, when it came out on VHS, found it surprisingly inconsequential—and stopped the tape long before the end, thinking that if this was the future of Chinese cinema, it was already in the past. Watching the film now, I have the sense of how right and how wrong this summary judgment was. I’m tempted to say that it still seems, in many ways, “stereotyped, schematic, and simplistic.” It certainly doesn’t make particularly original uses of the medium of movies, and Zhang’s compositions are impersonally expressive and impersonally pretty. But it’s impossible not to be moved, if in a very familiar and unoriginal way, by the sufferings of the characters—and, in particular, by the cruelty and torture, physical and mental, endured by Chinese villagers under the yoke of the invading Japanese army.
And I was blind, twenty years ago, to the film’s other, and very significant, virtues. The four elements that leap out now are memory, music, talk, and madness. The very fact that the story is told in the framework of a voice-over that tells the tale as it came down from the narrator’s grandfather, the protagonist, suggests the very importance of memory itself—not in the form of official histories but personal stories. The talk that takes place among working people (whether bearers or farmers) is the primordial telephone, which, if it sometimes distorts (as in the game), also conveys for safekeeping, over distances and through time, the first-hand experience that doesn’t come to light in censored public life. (That’s exactly the process that Mo’s essay brings to light.) The movie’s songs and dances serve the same function that the Kims’ sentimental movie did: to evoke true and primal emotion. As for madness, the film’s red-saturated, histrionic ending suggests the terrible psychic derangement resulting from the grievous wounds borne by the Chinese people during the war—and this is a first step toward diagnosing the violence of the decades of revolution and Cultural Revolution that followed.
That said, the book “Red Sorghum” is Mo Yan’s attempt to face memory in the first person; the movie is an adaptation of it, which its director nonetheless keeps at arm’s length—Zhang Yimou isn’t personally implicated in the telling of the story. And the Chinese cinema didn’t reach the world-historical stage until, with the films of Jia Zhangke (whose first film, “Xiao Shan Going Home,” is from 1995), they explored the past, in the present tense and the first person, by way of an explicit documentary element. The generation of directors that rose in Jia’s wake—including Wang Bing, Ying Liang, Lou Ye, and Zhao Liang—made films that are important in both the history of China and the history of cinema.