The sedan chair had been meant for Songlian. The transformation out of the modern world is total. The organisation of space is striking: tight, symmetrical framing, voyeuristic high angles, intimidating low angles, rigid high walls forming a daunting grid. Her scholarly and seemingly modern costume places her at odds with such a spectacle from the past, further emphasised by her arrival at the household. This single shot anticipates the entire film in microcosm as Songlian’s perverse surrender is in itself a supreme defiance, a destructive act of passive aggression that signals how she and the women she will meet are to behave towards each other.Īfter a further percussive outburst, a brief second scene shows Songlian staring at a passing sedan chair. Fixed in the glare of the unwavering camera, she sheds a tear. The spectator is thus positioned as her tormentor, forced to watch as this acceptance of fate overwhelms her. She goes beyond submission, asking to become the concubine of a rich man, living as far away as possible. Just as we only see Songlian’s half of the discussion, we are also dropped in halfway through the argument: ‘stop talking, mother’ she says flatly, before capitulating to unheard demands. For as the director has stated: ‘When tragedy is “made aesthetic”, then it is all the more overpowering’ (cited by Gateward 2001: 40).Īfter a startling, percussive introduction, a sustained head-shot opens the film, scrutinising Songlian’s responses to her unseen stepmother’s instruction that she abandons her studies in order to marry. Examined here is the presentation of spectacle and the underlying questions raised by Zhang’s methods of ‘looking’, aspects that give the film a richness and complexity to match its content. Raise the Red Lantern also displays Zhang’s signature style: balanced framing, bold use of colour and the penetrating close-up. Equally, there are wider themes that extend across Zhang’s entire body of work: the crushing of the individual as the price of community stability, Oedipal power structures and suppressed passion. Each focuses on women battling events beyond their control in prerevolutionary, feudal China. The three films each star actress Gong Li and share common themes: forced marriage, oppression, rebellion crushed, self-destruction and authoritarianism. Raise the Red Lantern is the third film of Zhang’s ‘Red Trilogy’. Zhang Yimou is a prominent member of the ‘fifth generation’ of Mainland Chinese filmmakers, the collective name given to the graduates of the Beijing Film Academy in the 1980s and the first trained after the Cultural Revolution. Each wife schemes and plots to make sure she is the chosen one. Each night Chen chooses the wife with whom to spend the night and a red lantern is lit in front of the house of his choice. The competition between the wives is fierce, as their master’s attention carries power, status and privilege. He already has three wives, each of them living in separate houses within his compound. After her father’s death, 19-year-old Songlian is forced to marry Chen Zuoqian, the 50-year-old head of a powerful family.
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