A Brief Analysis of the Film Yellow Land

The Yellow Land is mainly composed of prose, and the narrative is indeed a bit like prose. Although it has a story, it is not only telling a coherent story, but more information comes from outside the story. In addition to the main narrative line of the story, the film is interspersed with three relatively independent paragraphs: the wedding of a girl from a neighboring village, the waist drum array of Yan 'an farmers bidding farewell to the army and the solemn and pious rain-begging ceremony of farmers.

Yellow Land is a film that traces back and reflects on the long history, culture and national spirit of the Chinese nation. It is symbolic as a whole. The film is based on the plot, symbolized audio-visual image, and revealed by lens language and image itself, conveying ideological and artistic information: the original name of the film is Silent Ancient Plain. However, when the creator arrived in northern Shaanxi, he decided to change his name to Yellow Land. This is because they grasped the vast and magnificent yellow land as the central image and made it an important basis for the film's significance. These ten places sometimes appear as backgrounds and sometimes as empty shots, which run through the film. The author highlights and emphasizes the Yellow Land through various means, so that the audience can't help but appreciate it as an independent artistic image, and appreciate the ideas and power it contains. Most of the land locations in the film were shot in the early morning or evening, and the technical treatment was carried out to make the color of the ground appear warmer and thicker. This person is full of mother's warmth, giving people strength and hope. It is through the calm khaki tone that the film reflects the author's deep historical thinking from the modeling. The film begins with a long series of overlapping shots on the Loess Plateau. The ups and downs of the earth are endowed with life. Footsteps outside the painting enhance the symbolic meaning of the picture. We can also see this expression of land in the scenes of farming and farewell. In the warm light, a small group of cattle and three people are moving slowly on the high and bare top of the mountain. The undulating loess almost fills the picture. The bright and empty background sets off the small figure on the horizon. Their figure dissolved in heaven and earth has gone far beyond their original position in the plot. This difficult and powerful step is a historic step for our country. In the film, Cui Qiao went to fetch water from the Yellow River many times. This kind of action of carrying water is not only a highly exquisite lifestyle of the people in northern Shaanxi, but also a direct image of the Chinese nation struggling forward on the long historical road. In order to create an expressive symbolic image, all members of the film crew stepped on a winding path on the screen.

In the Yellow Land, not only the land is regarded as a symbolic image, but also many scenes, paragraphs and images, such as the Yellow River, waist and drum array, seeking beauty, wedding and so on, have much broader meanings than themselves. The Yellow River is known as the cradle and symbol of the Chinese nation. It is also a powerful artistic image and plays an important role in the film. Especially when Cui Qiao is like a boat, facing the storm at night and throwing herself into the embrace of the Yellow River, her figure gradually disappears into the night, and only cheerful songs come from a distance with the waves of the Yellow River, and the picture shakes from the tumbling English river to the bright moon in the sky. Suddenly, Cui Qiao's singing and Feng Shui ballad came to an abrupt end. When the heartbreaking cry broke the silence, six shots of the Yellow River were superimposed on the screen. These are not the last scenes in the time and space of the Yellow River. They have different lights and colors, different flow directions and shapes, and finally they are superimposed on a boulder on the river beach from the rolling water taken at high speed. Through powerful audio-visual images, the film highly sublimates the relationship between Cuiqiao and the Yellow River, and at the same time gives the Yellow River much richer significance than the simple environmental background.

In this movie, dark caves and winding paths are not just the environment. The weather-beaten old man in the cave under dim light and the villagers who bow down under the scorching sun are also fundamentally different from the characters in traditional films. They are all endowed with new meanings in the new film language system. The film Yellow Land can no longer be understood and explained by the traditional mode of "story plus characters". Here, the story is only the entrance, which is subject to the needs of the overall symbolic narrative structure. The film begins with an old-fashioned wedding of an unknown girl. When the wedding procession came from the winding mountain road, the sonorous suona sounded a little sad. Both Mr. Li's "master of ceremonies" and the spectators are expressionless. The bride and groom were almost knocked down on the dirt table, which indicated the misfortune of the bride and Tracy. Tracy watched all this timidly and hid by the door. There is a pair of red couplets on the door frame against which she leans, which reads "Three Obediences and Four Virtues". The scenes of Cui Qiao and couplets with the same picture appear repeatedly, which makes the audience feel as if she is standing in this martyred crowd. At the second wedding, Cui Qiao was the bride herself. But we didn't see her during the whole wedding. Everything seems the same as the previous wedding. The wedding procession and sedan chair, the scene and angle of the lens, and even the drum music and the noise of the crowd are very similar, which seems to strengthen the abstraction and kingly significance of this charming ceremony. People feel that the film is not only a tragic legend, but also one of the women who share the same fate in Qian Qian.

The second wedding process has passed, but there are more scenes in the bridal chamber that can't be taken for the first time. In the bridal chamber, red machinery, red pillows and Cui Qiao's red veil are full of pictures. Harsh doorbell rings, footsteps are getting closer and closer, and a rough weather-beaten black hand reaches out to the picture ... Under the red veil, Cui Qiao's frightened face dodges backwards, accompanied by unbearable silence for more than half a minute. Suddenly. Deafening drums rushed out of the screen. Under the bright sky, the waist drum array of farmers who turned over to send their children to join the army rolled like waves and was earth-shattering. Under the contrast of this jubilant and warm scene, Cui Qiao's marriage is even sadder. Waist drum array is the paragraph with the least direct contact with plot lines and characters in the whole film. But it is an indispensable part of the ideographic system of the whole movie. For the first time, we saw the lively side of farmers in northern Shaanxi: their exuberant vitality and yearning for a new life. The waist drum echoes the scene that the last Han Han ran to Gu Qing against the stream of people, and plays a very important role in expressing the author's comprehensive understanding of national history and people.

The movie Yellow Land is very touching. One of the important reasons why it can impress people is that it has made a great breakthrough in the traditional film language system. The author mobilized various film modeling methods to organically combine unique film language with unique content. No matter the change of plane position or the movement of characters are strictly controlled. This not only creates a stable modeling image, but also renders a restrained emotional tone and stagnant time flow. At the same time, it also adjusts the relationship between the audience and the screen, so that the audience will not be too involved in the "drama" and can appreciate the solemn sense of history conveyed by the film more effectively. In a word, The Yellow Land, through a series of subtle and meaningful screen images, has formed a modeling style that organically combines vivid film reproduction with symbolic philosophical observation, and achieved touching artistic effects. The appearance of Yellow Land has impacted the traditional film concept in both content and form. As soon as it appeared, it caused a heated debate. Although many people were dissatisfied with it, it won the Golden Rooster Award for best photography with 1984. In recent years, "Yellow Land" has also gained a high reputation in the international film industry, and won awards at international film festivals such as Locarno, Hawaii, London and Nantes. People regard Huang Shidi as a symbol of the rapid development of China movies.