Film Evaluation of Red Sorghum

From 65438 to 0987, Red Sorghum directed by Zhang Yimou was well received for its strong color and bold style (Chengdu Business Daily Review). The film portrays a group of ordinary people in China, such as "my grandmother", "my grandfather" and "uncle Lohan", praising their national spirit of daring to live and die, loving and hating, and also thinking about the history, personality, psychology, culture and lifestyle of the Chinese nation. The biggest feature of this film is that it shows the heroic and frank side of China people, which is quite different from the traditional sad and heavy style of Chinese mainland films. Photographer Gu Changwei has excellent performance in framing and color application. The scene where the hero and heroine meet in the sorghum field has the beauty of "the combination of scenery and people" that is rare in China movies, which makes people feel relaxed and happy (Netease Review).

Compared with the color division in Hero, Red Sorghum is not so complicated. The whole movie seems to consist only of yellow and red. On the loess high slope, there is yellow sand all over the sky, especially in the sedan chair section, where several sedan chairs are singing and dancing, bringing up rolling dust. Zhang Yimou, a native of Xi, expressed his love for the yellow land by splashing ink, and those yellow lands were the objects he wanted to worship. Red is more vivid. In addition to the "red" sorghum taller than people, there are "my grandmother's" red hijab, red sedan chair, red shoes, red window grilles on the window, red sorghum wine in the bowl, red fire, and the world that turned completely red during the last solar eclipse. The appearance of this bright color can better express the enthusiasm and boldness of people in northern Shaanxi, and present the upward mental state of farmers in China (Phoenix. com Review).

"Red Sorghum" is not a realistic work, nor is it the root of national culture. On the contrary, in this story that connects three generations with the past tense, a personality with future significance is created, which transcends the specific social surface and has the depth of humanity and essence. The theme that the film calls for from beginning to end is vigorous vitality, that is, to promote an undistorted, unrestrained and frank outlook on life. Therefore, the work in front of the audience is not an understood world, but a life ideal of the world. "Red Sorghum" is different from any previous film reflecting farmers, and its perspective has changed from a traditional praise of the land to a praise of life. The extraordinary characteristics of the story determine the unreality of the narrative, and the location of the story has also been diluted. In the film, the village, the most basic structure of society, was even diluted. All narrative elements and audio-visual elements in the film serve the warm, free and stirring style of this natural life.

Different from the previous exploration films, Red Sorghum also carries the director's thoughts on the theme of life, but it does not completely dilute the plot like the exploration films such as Yellow Land, but directly expresses the director's thoughts with the shock of pure film video language. In this film, Zhang Yimou weaves a complete, beautiful and moving story frame from the actual situation and the specific characters in the specified situation, so that the thoughts naturally overflow through the twists and turns of the story and the actions of the characters.

The film itself has a complete story line, but this narrative line is mostly completed by voiceover. At the beginning of the film, when it is completely black, the narrative of "I" comes from the vocal cords; "I'll tell you something about my grandparents, which was mentioned in my hometown." This is a viewpoint narrated in the present tense, and this "I" is the narrator of a story here. Because he didn't appear in the story, he should be an objective narrator, but he is the descendant of the characters in the story, which gives him a sense of participation and thus has the meaning of being narrated. Therefore, this view is very strange and novel, which gives the director a comfortable reference when dealing with the whole play, and he is very free and omniscient. At the same time, his narrative characteristics pull the story far away and have the effect of historical alienation. Based on this view, the director explained the fiction of the story in his opening remarks. "After a long time, some people believe that some people don't believe it." So it is very comfortable to integrate the story into unrealistic time and space. The voice-over appeared in the film at 12. The main plot turning points in the film, such as the relationship between characters, the surrounding environment, and the time transition, are almost all explained by voiceover. For example, the relationship between my grandmother and leprosy shopkeeper Li Datou, the "something congenial" in the sorghum field, the rules for the bride to return to her hometown after three days of marriage, the killing of Li Datou, and the process of kidnapping my grandmother with a bald head and a gun. Voice-over also assumes a function of "preview" in this film. For example, when the sedan chair left, the voice-over told the audience that the sedan chair would become my grandfather, which increased the audience's "expectation horizon" and made the progress of the picture story more tense (movie network review).