In a 4 page paper, discuss how Chinese self-identity (national identity) gets developed, articulated and negotiated in 4 rural films. To become “modern” means, among other things, a social transformation from a farming or agrarian society to an industrial civilization and consumer culture. In other words, who one is is often revealed in one’s changed or changing attitudes to farming, countryside, and rural existence vanishing rapidly.
- Which four of the following seven films strike you as a picture of agrarian China fading away into the distant past, a chapter or a page in history that has been turned:
- (1) Ermo, 1994
- (2) For the Children, 1996
- (3) Incense, 2002
- (4) Blind Shaft, 2003
- (5) Postmen in the Mountain, 1997
- (6) Not One Less, 2001
- (7) Qiu Qu, 1993
- What sentiments are associated with the changes for rural China and pre-modern cultures? What is missed and thought of with nostalgia? How is the viewer made to feel about new realities in which the “primitive” past becomes extinct?
- Do you enjoy the aesthetics of primitivism that calls upon the viewer to identify with those living in rural areas and rooted in land and farms? Are they spiritually rich or bankrupt?
- Do you see see similar cultural change as identified by critic Lucien Goldmann who argues that Balzac novels “. . . might constitute the only great literary expression of the world as structured by the conscious values of the bourgeoisie: individualism, the thirst for power, money, and eroticism, which triumph over the ancient feudal values of altruism, charity, and love”?
- Do you experience, as you watch these films about social change in China, a sense of history in terms of collision or conflict between two incompatible moral “goods” or ethical systems? Do you see unfolding a tragedy of modernization or conflict between traditional ways of life that have become ingrained and modes of existence that displace and supersede them? How do you justify such “tragic events” in history considering how the filmmakers have presented them?